Amid the tolling of the bells, sending a shudder through the silent population of the city, and heralded by the tramp of armed men, the death-march of the doomed woman and the doomed men begins. The still breathing men and still breathing woman are clothed already in their shrouds. As she totters first along the corridor, accompanied by her priest and requiring two soldiers to hold her erect, the very extremity of her helplessness and woe bears witness in her favor. Even the bloody Payne, who walks next behind her, has broken through that stolid indifference to his own fate, so remarkable as to indicate insanity, to clear her from all complicity with the assassination. Herold and Atzerodt, who follow, though themselves speechless with terror, seem to wave her mute acquittal, as they stumble along into the swift-coming Darkness. They reach the prison-yard. They mount the high scaffold. They are seated in four chairs facing the four dangling nooses, while the death-warrant is once more read. Their graves, already dug, are in full sight close by. Their coffins stand by the side of the open graves. They are raised up and pushed forward upon the two drops, Herold and Atzerodt on one, Mrs. Surratt and Payne on the other; the half-conscious woman still supported by the two guards. The ropes are adjusted. The hoods drawn over the face. The signal is given. The two drops fall. Surrounded by the unpitying soldiery, headed by the unpitying Hartranft, the woman and the men hang writhing in the agonies of an ignominious death. When pronounced dead, the bodies are cut down. They are laid out on the top of the coffins. A hurried post-mortem examination is made. And, then, at four o'clock in the afternoon, they are inclosed in the coffins and buried side by side. The soldiers depart with flourish of trumpet and beat of drum. Silence descends on the grounds of the old Arsenal; broken only by the pace of the sentinel set to guard the four corpses. The daughter may beg the stern Secretary to yield up the body of her murdered mother, that she may place it in consecrated ground. But she will beg in vain. And so ended the fell tragedy. And so did brave soldiers avenge the murder of their "beloved Commander-in-Chief." Methinks their beloved Commander-in-Chief, could his freed spirit have found a mortal voice, would have spurned, with indignant horror, the savage sacrifice of a defenseless woman to appease his gentle shade. CHAPTER VIII. WAS IT NOT MURDER? And now what shall be said as to this taking of human life? Maintaining the most rigorous allegiance to the simple unadulterated truth, what can be said? Arraigned at the bar of the common law as expounded by the precedents of centuries, and confronted by plain provisions of the Constitution of the United States, which need no exposition and yet have been luminously expounded; but one thing can be said.