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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)70 HTe i/e, Crime and Capture of John Wilkee Booth.
The bayonets'at the gate were lifted as I produced my pan. It was the
last permission granted. In giving it away the General seemed relieved,
for he hd been sorely troubled by applications. Everybody who had visited Washi.ngton to seek for an office, sought to see this expiation also.
The officer at the gate looked at my pass'suspiciously. " I don't believe
that all these papers have been genuine," he said. Is an execution, then,
so great a wanling to evil-doers, that men will commit forgery to see it?
I entered a large grassy yard, surrounded by an exceedingly high wall.
On the top of this wall, soldiers with muskets in their hands, were thickly
planted. The yard below was broken by irregular buildings of brick. I
climbed by a flight of rickety outside stairs to the central building, where
miany officers were seated at the windows, and looked awhile at the strange
scene on the grassy plaza. On the left, the long, barred, impregnable pen.
itentiary rose. The shady spots beneath it were occupied by huddling
spectators. Soldiers were filling-their canteens at the pump. A face or
two looked out from the barred jail. There were many umbrellas hoisted
on the ground to shelter civilians beneath them. Squads of officers and
citizens lay along the narrow'shadow of the walls. The north side of the
ard was enclosed on three sides by columns of soldiers drawn up in regu.
?lr order, the side next to the penitentiary being short to admit of in,rcss
to the prisoner's door; but the opposite column reached entirely up to the
iorth wall.
Within this enclosed area a structure to be inhabited by neither the livilig nor the dead was fast approaching con-plcetion. It stood gaunlt, lofty,
oloa. Saws and hammers mnade dolorous- music on it. }Ien, in their
silir't sleeves, Dwere Iicasuriillg it aiid directing its construction in a b)usiness
way. Now anid then some one would ascend its airy stair to test its firm.
ness; others crawled beneath to wedge its slim supports, or carry away the
falling debris.
Toward this skeleton edifice" all looked with a strange nervousness.
It was the thought and speculation of the gravest and the g.tyest.
It was the gallows.
A beans reached, horizontally, in the air, twenty feet from the ground;
four awkward ropes, at irregular intervals, dangled from it, each noosed at
the end. It was upheld. by three props, one in the center and one at each
end. These props came all the way to the ground where they were inor.
ticed. in heavy bars. Midway of them a fibor was laid, twenty by twelve
feet, held in its positionl on the farther side by shorter props, of whicl,
there were mnany, and reached by fifteen creaking steps, railed on'either
side. But this -floor had no supports on the side nearest the eye, except
two temporary rods, at the foot of which two inclined beams pointed menacingly, held'in poise by ropes from the gallows floor.
And this floor was presently discovered to be a cheat, a trap, a pitfall.
Two hinges only held it to its firmer half. These were to.give way at
the fatal moment, and leave- only the shallow and-unreliable air for the bound
and smothering to tread upofi.
The traps were two, sustained by two different props.
The nooses were on each side of the central support.
Was this all?
N.)t all.
Close byj the foot of the gallows fbur wooden boxes were piled upou
each other at the edge of four newly excavated pits, the fresh earth of which
was already dried and brittle.in the burning noon.
IIere were to be interred the broken carcasses when the gallows had let