The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth,: with a full sketch of the conspiracy of which he was the leader, and the pursuit, trial and execution of his accomplices./ By George Alfred Townsend.

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Great Cmar's dust, which stopped a knot-hole, h in this play bo an
Inverse parallel. He was at best hostler to a murderer, and failed In that.
His chief concern at present is to have somebody to talk to; and he thinks.
upon the whole, that if an assassination is productive of so little fiu, he will
have nothing to do with another one.
That Harold has slipped into history gives us'as much surprise as that
he has yet to suffer death gives us almost contempt for the scafodl. But
if the scaffold must wait for only wise men to get upon it, it must rot.
Your wise man does no murder in the first place, and if so, in the second,
he dodges the penalty. In this world, Harold, idiotcy is oftncr punished
than guilt.
That Booth should have used Hlarold is very naturally accounted for.
Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them. Booth
referred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by an eagle and
be screamed at now and then.
At the right hand side of Harold sits a soldier in blue, who is evidently
thinking abouta game of quoits with his comrades in the jail yard; he wonders why lawyers are so very dry, and is surprised to find a trial for murder as tedious as a thanksgiving sermon.
But on the soldier's other hand is a figure which makes the center and
cynosure of this thrilling scene. Taller by a whole head than either hit
companions or the sentries, Payne, the assassin, sits erect, ahd flings his
barbarian eye to. and fro, radiating the tremendous energy of his colossal
physique.
hie is the only man worthy to have. murdered Mr. Seward. When
against the delicate organization, the fine, subtle, nervous mind of the Secretary of State, this giant, knife in hand, precipitated himself, two forms of
civilization met as distinctly as when the savage' Gauls invaded the Roman
senate.
Lawlessness and intelligence, the savage and the statesman, body' and
mind, fought together upon.Mr. Seward's bed.
The mystery attending Payne's home' and parentage still exists to make
him more incomprehensible. Out of the vague, dim ultima thule,
like those Asiatic hordes which came from nowhere and shivered civilization,
Payne suddenly appeared and fought his way to the sanctum tanctorum of
law. I think his part in the assassination more remarkable than Booth's,
The latter's crime was shrewdly plotted, as by one measuring'intelligence
with the whole government. But Payne did not think-he only
struck!
With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some ]laori
chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion.
His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer would
afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a character nose,
bensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is'full and the brow
speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex at the tip of the
cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red Jacket's or Tecumseh's;
but the head is kept well up, and rtsts upon a wonderfully'broad throat,
muscular as one's thigh, and without any trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple.. Withal, the eye is the man Payne's, power. It
is dark and speechless, and rollshere and there like that of a beast in a c.Ige
which strives in vain to understand the language of its captors. It secams
to say, if anything, that it has'no sympathy with anybod approxima
fld han submitted, like a lion bound, to the aogicfonviction an,(f of. tra.ns.
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