although for a few days he eluded pursuit, he was traced up, surrounded in a barn, where he had taken refuge, and was shot in the head by a soldier and killed. His body was castnone but two men intrusted with the task know where. The assassin who attempted the life of Mr. Seward and the immediate accomplices of Booth were captured, tried, and hung. On the 14th of April the country was in the height of its joy over the glorious termination of four long years of dreadful war. On the morning of the 15th the terrible news of the assassination flew to the remotest villages, and the nation stood overwhelmed with horror and grief. The sun-and-storm-beaten soldier, the aged patriot on his staff, the strong man in his prime, bent like rushes and wept and sobbed like children. The death of no other man since time began carried sorrow to so many hearts and drew tears from so many eyes as the tragic death of Abraham Lincoln. Most appalling it was to the poor colored people. They had looked to him as their deliverer, their tender father, their protector, almost their earthly all. In some of their simple hearts he was enshrined and endowed with superhuman attributes. They regarded him as clothed with wisdom and love, in some degree approaching and resembling the attributes of JESUS. He fell beneath the malice of that system which had so long and so terribly trampled them to the earth, and they could only find comfort in casting themselves upon the mighty arm of their Father, God. The body of the dead emancipator was embalmed and borne on its funeral march to his home in Springfield. No such funeral procession has the world ever seen-probably will never see again. The cities and villages radiant, but a brief time before, with banners and illuminations were hung, street by street, with heavy folds of black drapery. Tens of thousands pressed to cast a last sad gaze at that cold face, and sobbed aloud at the mournful view. Arriving at Springfield, he was entombed in a family vault; and thus, glorious in life and grand in death, passed away the great and good President. The death-shot under which the President fell was such as to extinguish sensation and consciousness instantly. He did not, could not know, while his spirit lingered in the body, any thing of what had been done. The pall of darkness and insensi bility fell upon him in the twinkling of an eye; he, therefore, suffered no pain. Other martyrs have passed through the fire and the torments invented by human malignity-have had to nerve themselves for days and weeks in anticipation of the ordeal through which they were called to pass. Lincoln was suddenly called from the triumph on earth, as we may fondly trust, to the triumph in salvation through the merits of Jesus, without a conscious struggle or a pang of mind or of body. In extreme contrast with the last days and death of the illustrious victim was the close of the career of the assassin. Vengeance leaped upon him while the report of his murderous pistol-shot yet echoed through the hall-not with sudden annihilation, but with the first pang of protracted torment. Springing down from the box to the stage of the theater, his leg was broken near the ankle by the fall; and although he succeeded in reaching and mounting his horse, the rugged bones of his broken limb lacerated the flesh at every leap of his flight. Having secreted himself in a swamp, the agony of his swollen leg was lost in the fiercer pangs of despair. Abhorred and hunted down with im GOD'S RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. 175 placable animosity, he wrote in his diary that God could not pardon a crime which proved so revolting to human nature. Detested, abandoned, starving, in agony and weakness of body, and in despair, listening with alert terror for the footsteps of the avenger, not a word of sympathy or cheer, not an act of kindness, with no possible relief except through death, and no exit from death but into hell-so he passed the few days between his crime and his painful, bloody end. While we can not, in most instances, safely ascribe overwhelming disaster to the retributive justice of God, yet that the Almighty does, on some occasions, suddenly follow crime with terrible evidences of his indignation is beyond peradventure. So marked have been the examples of instant vengeance on atrocious crimes, that in every age and every land the fact has been impressed on the human mind. His "burning coals of juniper" and his "sharp arrows" flash and fly even in a world designed to be probationary. The persistency with which horrible disease, horrible death, and intolerable anguish of soul have pursued the Herods, Neros, and such like monsters of iniquity, is a fact too sharply defined to admit of cavil. And yet |