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546 Funeral of Lincoln. Attack on Secretary Seward. [i865 " Sic semper tyrannis" and, hastening through the familiar passages to the rear door of the theatre, mounted a saddle-horse waiting there and galloped away. The ball fired by the assassin had entered the back of the President's head on the left side, and, passing through the brain, lodged just behind the left eye. For an instant the audience was stupefied by the pistol- shot and the assassin's dramatic exit; then followed clamour and con- fusion in the effort to render assistance and in the eagerness of pursuit. The wounded President, breathing but unconscious, was borne to a house across the street. Before such a hurt the skill of the surgeons was unavailing ; yet his strong vitality was slow to surrender life. The family and State dignitaries watched by his bedside through the night, and at twenty-two minutes past seven the next morning Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. Vice-President Andrew Johnson was in Washington at the time, and at eleven o'clock Chief Justice Chase, in the presence of a few witnesses, administered to him the oath of the presidential office. This formal ceremony passed almost unnoticed amid the profound grief and gloom that President Lincoln's death spread through the nation. On the 19th, after a brief funeral service in the East Room, the body was borne with solemn official and military pomp to the rotunda of the Capitol, where it lay in state until the evening of the next day, and where thousands took a last look upon his face. Then began a great mourning pageant, in which the remains were borne amid impressive and reverent popular demonstrations through the great cities of the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, back to his home at Springfield, Illinois, over almost the same route by which he had come to the seat of government as President-elect in February, 1861. On May 4, 1865, the body was laid to rest in the cemetery of Oak Ridge, where an imposing monument has been erected over the grave. The elaborate preparations to assassinate the President were the result of a conspiracy which Booth had arranged and had been carrying on for some weeks, though the final devices of the plot were contrived the same day. Nine persons were active in the conspiracy, with a number of others, some consciously, some unconsciously, playing minor parts. The plot contemplated the assassination of several other high government officials, upon only one of whom, however, an attack was made. Secretary of State Seward was confined to his bed by a fracture of the arm and jaw received in a fall from his carriage. Simultaneously with the tragedy at the theatre, one of the conspirators named Payne, a stalwart but brutal and simple-minded youth of twenty years, pre- tending to bring medicine for the Secretary, forced his way into Mr Seward's bedroom, in the second storey of his house, and despite the efforts of Seward's son, whom he beat down with the butt of a