In the Presidential box someone leaned over the balustrade and yelled: ``He has shot the President!''

That got everybody up. On the stage, Harry Hawk began to weep. Laura Keene brushed by him with the glass of water. The crowd began to move. In Washington City everyone lived in a bubble of plots, and one death might attract another. It was not exactly panic they gave way to, but they could not just sit there. The beehive voices, for no one could bear silence, drowned out the sound of Mrs. Lincoln's weeping.

At the rear of the auditorium, upstairs, some men tried to push open the door to the box corridor. It would not give.

A Dr. Charles Taft clambered up on the stage and got the actors to hoist him up to the box. In the audience a man named Ferguson lost his head and tried to rescue a little girl from the mob, on the same principle which had led Miss Harris to demand water.

Someone opened the corridor door from the inside, and called for a doctor. Somehow Dr. Charles Leale was forced through the mob and squeezed out into the dingy corridor. He went straight to the Presidential box.

As usual, Mrs. Lincoln had lost her head, but nobody blamed her for doing so now. There was a little blood on the hem of her dress, for the assassin had slashed Miss Harris's companion, Major Rathbone, with a knife. Rathbone said he was bleeding to death. By the look of him he wasn't that far gone.