The play went on pleasantly, though Mr. Wilkes Booth an observer of the audience, visited the stage and took note of the positions. His alleged associate, the stage carpenter, then received quiet orders to clear the passage by the wings from the prompter's post to the stage door. All this time, Mr. Lincoln, in his family circle, unconscious of the death that crowded fast upon him, watched the pleasantry and smiled and felt heartful of gentleness. Suddenly there was a murmur near the audience door, as of a man speaking above his bound. He said: "Nine o'clock and forty-five minutes!" These words were reiterated from mouth to mouth until they passed the theater door, and were heard upon the sidewalk. Directly a voice cried, in the same slightly-raised monotone: "Nine o'clock and fifty minutes!" This also passed from man to man, until it touched the street like a shudder. "Nine o'clock and fifty-five minutes!" said the same relentless voice, after the next interval, each of which narrowed to a lesser span the life of the good President. Ten o'clock here sounded, and conspiring echo said in reverberation: "Ten o'clock!" So like a creeping thing, from lip to lip, went: "Ten o'clock and five minutes." (An interval.) "Ten o'clock and ten minutes!" At this instant Wilkes Booth appeared in the door of the theater, and the men who had repeated the time so faithfully and so ominously scattered at his coming, as at some warning phantom. Fifteen minutes afterwards the telegraph wires were cut. All this is so dramatic that I fear to excite a laugh when I write it. But it is true and proven, and I do not say it but report it. All evil deeds go wrong. While the click of the pistol, taking the President's life, went like a pang through the theater, Payne was spilling blood in Mr. Seward's house from threshold to sick chamber. But Booth's broken leg delayed him or made him lose his general calmness and he and Harold left Payne no to his fate. I have not adverted to the hole bored with a gimlet in the entry door of Mr. Lincoln's box, and cut out with a penknife. The theory that the pistol-ball of Booth passed through this hole is exploded. And the stage carpenter may have to answer for this little orifice with all his neck. For when Booth leaped from the box he strode straight across the stage by the footlights, reaching the prompter's post, which is immediately behind that private box opposite Mr. Lincoln. From this box to the stage door in the rear, the passage-way leads behind the ends of the scenes, and if generally either closest up by one or more withdrawn scenes, or so narrow that only by doubling and turning sidewise can one pass along. On this fearful night, however, the scenes were so adjusted to the murderer's design that he had a free aisle from the foot of the stage to the exit door.