He went to the White House reception and, when his turn came and his hand was in the huge presidential grasp, he began to talk hastily and volubly, hoping to elicit some response. Lincoln listened a second, gazing at him gravely with his deep-set eyes, and then he laid an enormous hand in a loose, wrinkled white glove across his back. "Don't dwell!" said he gently to his caller; and shoved him along, amiably but relentlessly, with the rest of the line. So the man got only his two words after all. One week before the President was murdered I was in Washington and sat in the exact place in which he sat when he was shot. It was the same box, the same chair, and on Friday too,--one week to the day and hour before the tragedy. When I heard the terrible news I was able to picture exactly what it had been like. I could see just the jump that Booth must have had to make to get away. I never knew Wilkes Booth personally nor saw him act, but I have several times seen him leaving his theatre after a performance, with a raft of adoring matinée girls forming a more or less surreptitous guard afar off. He was a tremendously popular idol and strikingly handsome. Even after his wicked crime there were many women who professed a sort of hysterical sympathy and pity for him. Somebody has said that there would always be at least one woman at the death-bed of the worst criminal in the world if she could get to it; and there were hundreds of the sex who would have been charmed to watch beside Booth's, bad as he was and crazy into the bargain. It is a mysterious thing, the fascination that criminals have for some people, particularly women. Perhaps it is fundamentally a respect for accomplishment; admiration for the doing of something, good or evil, that they would not dare to do themselves. We had all gone to Chicago for our spring opera season and were ready to open, when the tragic tidings came and shut down summarily upon every preparation for amusement of any kind. Every city in the Union went into mourning for the man whom the country idolised; of whom so many people spoke as _our_ "Abraham Lincoln." Perhaps it was because of this universal and almost personal affection that the authorities did such an odd thing--or, at least, it struck me as odd,--with his body. He was taken all over the country and "lay-in-state," as it is called, in different court houses in different states.