Guiteau, the assassin, had a sensational trial in the old City Hall. This attracted a great deal of attention, particularly on the part of the morbid curiosity-seekers who assembled daily to see the prisoner go to and from the jail to the City Hall. He paid for his act with his life. Although of good family, educated and clever, he had always been queer--a religious fanatic, who took nothing in halfway fashion. He was an extremist upon all things that interested him at all, and after years of travel abroad, imbibing all sorts of radical ideas, he came back with tendencies that found expression in opposition to all regularity of action. He had followed President Garfield about, he said, for weeks. Because of his political activity and his mad act, it was alleged that the shooting was due to factional resentment over the total eclipse of Conkling and Platt. Guiteau’s sister and her husband, the latter reluctantly, at his wife’s request, serving as the prisoner’s counsel, won the pity and respect of everyone by their own demeanour. Mrs. Garfield was just at her best when she came to the White House. Just beginning her forties, she had a background of culture and breeding from ancestry and education that made her a welcome addition to the best circles, brief though her régime proved to be. Although she was well known in Washington society during her husband’s long service in Congress, when it became known that she was to be the successor of Mrs. Hayes, public attention was centred upon her and created a great demand for information about the incoming mistress of the White House. People who claimed intimacy with this family say that she was fully as conversant with politics as her husband, and that he found in his wife intelligent and understanding companionship; that it was she who aided him in working out his political problems, and that is why he consulted none of his party associates. The General had this to say of Mrs. Garfield: “I have been wonderfully blessed in the discretion of my wife. She is one of the coolest and best-balanced women I ever saw. She is unstampedable. There has not been one solitary instance of my public career where I suffered in the smallest degree for any remark she ever made. It would have been perfectly natural for a woman often to say something that could be misinterpreted; but without any design, and with the intelligence and coolness of her character, she has never made the slightest mistake that I ever heard of. With the competition that has been against me, many times such discretion has been a real blessing.” Mrs. Garfield survived her husband many years, living to see among other memorials that bear his name a huge hospital in the Capitol City, which must have held for her a peculiar appeal. CHAPTER VI ADMINISTRATION OF CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR _September 20, 1881, to March 4, 1885_