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. In summer he rode through lonely roads 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 passed away, until precisely at the time when
the triumph of the nation seemed assured, and a feeling of peace and
security settled over the country, one of the conspiracies, seemingly no
more important than the others, ripened in a sudden heat of hatred and
despair.

A little band of desperate secessionists, of which John Wilkes Booth,
an actor of a family of famous players, was the head, had their usual
meeting-place at the house of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt, the mother of one
of the number. Booth was a young man of twenty-six, strikingly handsome,
with an ease and grace of manner which came to him of right from his
theatrical ancestors. He was a fanatical southerner, with a furious
hatred against Lincoln and the Union. After Lincoln's reelection he went
to Canada, and associated with the Confederate agents there; and whether
or not with their advice, made a plan to capture the President and
take him to Richmond. He passed a great part of the autumn and winter
pursuing this fantastic scheme, but the winter wore away, and nothing
was done. On March 4 he was at the Capitol, and created a disturbance
by trying to force his way through the line of policemen who guarded
the passage through which the President walked to the East front of the
building to read his Second Inaugural. His intentions at this time are
not known. He afterwards said he lost an excellent chance of killing the
President that day.

After the surrender of Lee, in a rage akin to madness, he called his
fellow-conspirators together and allotted to each his part in the new
crime which had risen in his mind. It was as simple as it was horrible.
One man was t