Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/110

 and little personal consequence, and her later career was not altogether happy. The male beauty with somewhat similar points who played havoc with the hearts of the society buds of the period was a son of Dr. Leonard R. Koecker, a Walnut Street dentist. I have sometimes wondered what became of him.

At the fair I saw again Abraham Lincoln, who had come from Washington to participate.

Having gone to the camp at West Chester to bid farewell to my friends in Company G of the First Pennsylvania Reserves, when they started forth in 1861, I went to the Cooper Shop and Volunteer Refreshment Saloon to see those who survived fed on their way home—bronzed and experienced veterans in 1864. White, Armitage, Bradley and many more were not among them. Their captain, John R. Dobson, still a captain after three years of service, soon became a major-general of militia.

One morning in April, 1865, the news came that Mr. Lincoln had been assassinated the night before, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, by one of a band of rebel plotters, and attempts had been made upon the lives of members of his cabinet. No such event had ever before occurred in America. Its effect was to arouse all the undercurrent of animal passions. Along with the warm glow of love for one who had been so gentle, considerate and wise, arose the desire to tear into pieces those who had harmed him. Personally I felt that I wanted to set my teeth in the throat of some rebel and that the inability to gratify the impulse was a deprivation. In a remarkable way the war revealed to men how thin is the gloss of civilization and how below seethe the primary passions which have ever swayed them.

Perched on the roof of a building on south Broad Street, the catafalque that bore his body passed before me and thousands of others and the next morning I arose early to go to Independence Hall. Forming in line, we walked two by two along the north side of Chestnut Street from Fifth Street 100