THE INFAMY OF A DEED THAT ROBBED A NATION A 'ND after all-what does it mean for a man to live ill? The world turned in wrath against the murderers of the man who had loved humanity. Bitterness raged in their hearts against the assassins. Their names, which are hardly fit to speak, except as they stand as ignominious warning to mankind, aroused only the hatred of their fellow-men, and, like all who break the laws of God and man, are passing down through the generations to be loathed. The assassin, who, craving for notoriety, had fired the fatal shot in the theater, fled from the stage in the excitement. His leg broken by the fall from the balcony, he escaped on a horse that was waiting for him in the streets, all the fast closing hours of his life to be haunted as a creature too low to be allowed to exist even in the blood of his own crime. Pitiful figure that he was, cursed by his own morbid longings, and believing that the world might look upon and glorify him for his daring, he found himself riding into the mouth of hell. Slowly, but surely, the grip of the law tightened about him. Driven to desperation, he took his last refuge in a barn on a Virginia farm, only to see his last friend betray him. As the flames leaped from his place of refuge, he rose from his crouching position and stood upright, leaning upon a crutch, and holding a carbine. His eyes glared with the light of fever; his face was haggard from eleven days of the most fearful torture that a man can endure. There was a flash from a cavalry rifle. The crutch fell at his side. A long groan came from his lips; his face writhed in agony he had paid the penalty. Look upon him with all the pity that is within your heart-poor, unfortunate, deluded man. In his moment of ambition he forgot the ruling hand of Justice that no man ever was or ever will be able to overpower. He forgot that while, for a time, we may withstand it, there is within every man's heart a law that he never can escape-the law of conscience. As they carried his body away, to give it a secret resting place that no man will ever know, a diary fell from his pocket. In it was scribbled the last words of an agonized heart: "Hunted like a dog through the swamps I am here in despair. . I am abandoned with the curse of Cain upon me." And turn now to the prison yard. There on the gallows hang the bodies of those, who, in their blindness, were led into this plot. There in the prison cell sit those who listened to false ambition-now rejected and despised by their fellow-men. Look upon them all with pity! |