te. The report of the fire arm,
the smell of powder, the cries of "_fire_," which resounded through the
apartment, the confusion which followed the king's fall, the real or
feigned anxiety of persons who hurried forward to save him, favoured the
escape of the assassins: the pistol had been dropped on the ground.
Gustavus did not lose his presence of mind for a moment. He ordered the
doors to be immediately closed, and desired all to unmask. Carried by
his guards into an apartment in the opera-house, he was confided to his
surgeons. He admitted some of the foreign ministers into his presence,
and spoke to them with all the calmness of a strong mind. Even his pain
did not inspire him with any feeling of vengeance. Generous even in
death, he demanded anxiously if the assassin had been apprehended. He
was told that he was unknown. "Oh God, grant," he said, "that he may not
be discovered."

Whilst the king was receiving the first attentions, and being conveyed
to the palace, the guards stationed at the doors of the ball-room
compelled all to take off their masks, asked their names, and searched
their persons: nothing suspicious was discovered. Four of the chief
conspirators, men of the highest nobility in Stockholm, had succeeded
in escaping from the apartment in the first confusion produced by the
report of the pistol, and before the doors had been closed. Of nine
confidants or accomplices in the crime, eight had already gone away
without exciting any suspicion: only one was left in the apartment, who
affected a slow step and calm demeanour as guarantees of his innocence.

He left the apartment last of all, raising his mask before the officer
of police, and saying, as he looked steadfastly at him, "As for me, sir,
I hope you do not suspect me." This man was the assassin.

They allowed him to pass; the crime had no other evidence than itself, a
pistol, and a knife, sharpened as a poignard, found beneath the masks
and flowers on the floor of the opera. The weapon revealed the hand. A
gunsmith at Stockholm identified the pistol, and declared he had
recently sold it to a Swedish gentleman, formerly an officer in the
guards, named Ankastroem. They found Ankastroem at his house, neither
thinking of exculpation nor of flight. He confessed the weapon and the
crime. An unjust judgment, he averred, in which however the king spared
his life, the wearisomeness of an existence which he had cherished to
employ and make illustrious at i