t his life was therefore in reach of any one, sane or mad, who was
ready to murder and be hanged for it; and that he could not possibly
guard against all danger unless he shut himself up in an iron box, in
which condition he could scarcely perform the duties of a President. He
therefore went in and out before the people, always unarmed, generally
unattended. He received hundreds of visitors in a day, his breast bare
to pistol or knife. He walked at midnight, with a single secretary, or
alone, from the Executive Mansion to the War Department and back. He
rode through the lonely roads of an uninhabited suburb from the White
House to the Soldiers' Home in the dusk of the evening, and returned to
his work in the morning before the town was astir. He was greatly
annoyed when it was decided that there must be a guard at the Executive
Mansion, and that a squad of cavalry must accompany him on his daily
drive; but he was always reasonable, and yielded to the best judgment of
others.

Four years of threats and boastings that were unfounded, and of plots
that came to nothing, thus passed away; but precisely at the time when
the triumph of the nation seemed assured, and a feeling of peace and
security was diffused over the country, one of the conspiracies,
apparently no more important than the others, ripened in the sudden heat
of hatred and despair. A little band of malignant secessionists,
consisting of John Wilkes Booth, an actor of a family of famous players;
Lewis Powell, alias Payne, a disbanded rebel soldier from Florida;
George Atzerodt, formerly a coachmaker, but more recently a spy and
blockade-runner of the Potomac; David E. Herold, a young druggist's
clerk; Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlin, Maryland secessionists and
Confederate soldiers; and John H. Surratt, had their ordinary rendezvous
at the house of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt, the widowed mother of the last
named, formerly a woman of some property in Maryland, but reduced by
reverses to keeping a small boarding-house in Washington.

Booth was the leader of the little coterie. He was a young man of
twenty-six, strikingly handsome, with that ease and grace of manner
which came to him of right from his theatrical ancestors. He had played
for several seasons with only indifferent success, his value as an actor
lying rather in his romantic beauty of person than in any talent or
industry he possessed. He was a fanatical secessionist, and had imbibed
at Richmond and other