A great crowd assembled to cheer the Queen when she drove out on the following day. "One long shout of hurrahs," with waving of hats and handkerchiefs, greeted her. She bowed and smiled and appeared calm and collected, though somewhat flushed; but when she came back from what is described as like a triumphal progress, it was observed that, in spite of her gratification, she looked pale and not so well as she had done on the day preceding the attack. The bravest heart in a woman's breast could not surmount unmoved such an ordeal; she was at the Italian Opera the same evening, however, and heard the national anthem interrupted at every line by bursts of cheering. In this case, as in the other, the offender was a mere lad, little over twenty, named John Francis. He was the son of a stage-carpenter, and had himself been a young carpenter who had led an irregular life, and been guilty of dishonesty. He behaved at first with much coolness and indifference, jeering at the magistrates. Francis was tried in the month of June for high treason, and sentenced to death, when his bluster ceased, and he fell back in a fainting fit in the arms of the turnkey. The Queen was exceedingly anxious that the sentence should not be executed, though "fully conscious of the encouragement to similar attempts--which might follow from such leniency," and the sentence of death was commuted to banishment for life. On the very day after the commutation of the sentence had been announced, Sunday, the 3rd of July, the Queen was again fired at as she sat by the side of her uncle, King Leopold, on her way to the Chapel Royal, St. James's. The pistol missed fire, and the man who presented it, a hunchback, was seized by a boy of sixteen called Dasset. So ridiculous did the group seem, that the very policemen pushed away both captor and captive as actors in a bad practical joke. Then the boy Dasset, who retained the pistol, was in danger of being taken up as the real culprit, trying to throw the blame upon another. At last several witnesses proved the true state of the case. The pistol was discovered to contain only powder, paper, and some bits of a tobacco-pipe rammed together. On examination it was found that the hunchback, another miserable lad named Bean, was a chemist's assistant, who had written a letter to his father declaring that he "would never see him again, as he intended doing something which was not dishonest, but desperate." The Queen was not aware of Bean's attempt till she came back from St. James's, "when she betrayed no alarm, but said she had expected a repetition of the attempts on her life, so long as the law remained unaltered by which they could be dealt with only as acts of high treason."