Prior to the President entering his carriage there was a delay for a few minutes at the entrance to the baggage-room to permit the remains of President McKinley to be borne through the crowd and placed in the hearse awaiting them. This sable equipage was drawn by six black horses, each animal covered with a heavy black netting, and each horse led by a negro groom in regulation funeral dress. There was a shuffling of feet as the crowd of distinguished men in attendance upon the President followed his footsteps, which led towards waiting carriages and, surrounded by clattering cavalry and fully equipped infantry, President Roosevelt and the escort left the railroad station and started up Pennsylvania avenue through the lanes of people, who occupied every available inch of room from the curbstone to the building line of the houses against which they pressed. It was a weird but solemn spectacle that greeted the vision of President Roosevelt and his escort as they rode through the silent streets of the capital to make preparation for the funeral services to be held in the Capitol Building next day. Men, women, and children peered into the darkness in a vain endeavor to ascertain who were the occupants of the carriages, but in this they were disappointed, for darkness threw a veil over the scene from one end of the route to the other. All that could be seen was the gleam of sabers as the cavalry clattered up the avenue and the gleam of a musket barrel and the glitter of gold lace when an electric light or a gas jet threw some gleams of radiance upon them. Not a word was uttered during that solemn drive, and Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth President of the United States, was not even visible as he came to take the position which had been filled so ably and efficiently by William McKinley. It was a different inauguration procession from that in which President Roosevelt participated last March, for while on that occasion there was glad acclaim and exulting shouts of gratified patriots, on this occasion there was silence, somberness, and gloom, painful in its intensity. And thus Theodore Roosevelt entered the Capitol of the nation to become the first citizen of the greatest republic on earth. In the east room at the White House, where President McKinley so often was the central figure of noble gatherings, his mortal remains were placed. It was his last night in the place he had made his home for four and one-half years. Up-stairs the widow occupied the room where she underwent so much suffering and where she was nursed back to health by the devoted husband who now is lost to her for all time. Except for the immediate family, the guards, and the servants, the executive mansion was deserted, the public retiring and leaving those nearest and dearest to the dead President alone with their grief.