Free The Day Lincoln Was Shot by Jim Bishop

by disease, were about 133,000. Both sides paid in dead a little more than one and a half percent of the population of 31,000,000 people.
    Inside the Executive Mansion, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln entertained a few friends. In the Red Room, he sat beside her on a sofa and listened to her birdy chatter. At ten, tea and cakes were served and, shortly afterward, the friends began to make their adieux. That is, all except Ward Hill Lamon, Senator Harlan and his daughter, and one or two others. The dominant emotion seemed to be relief rather than happiness. It was difficult to talk in an evening of no tensions.
    To make conversation, Mrs. Lincoln said that, in the midst of joy, her husband’s face looked long and solemn. The President said that his mind had been heavy. The faces turned toward him.
    â€œIt seems strange,” he said slowly, as though feeling for the words, “how much there is in the Bible about dreams. There are, I think, some sixteen chapters in the Old Testament and four or five in the New in which dreams are mentioned; and there are many other passages scattered throughout the book which refer to visions. If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that, in the old days, God and his angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.”
    Mr. Lincoln studied the suddenly solemn faces of his friends. He sat forward, elbows on knees, the veined hands describing small gestures.
    â€œNowadays,” he said apologetically, “dreams are regarded as very foolish, and are seldom told, except by old women and by young men and maidens in love.”
    Mrs. Lincoln looked worried. “Why?” she said. “Do you believe in dreams?”
    â€œI can’t say that I do,” he said, hedging against the nightmares she had suffered for many years, “but I had one the other night which has haunted me ever since. After it occurred, the first time I opened the Bible, strange as it may appear, it was at the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis, which relates the wonderful dream Jacob had. I turned to other passages, and seemed to encounter a dream or a vision wherever I looked. I kept on turning the leaves of the old book, and everywhere my eyes fell upon passages recording matters strangely in keeping with my own thoughts—supernatural visitations, dreams, visions, and so forth.”
    Mrs. Lincoln clutched her bosom. “You frighten me,” she breathed. “What is the matter?”
    At once the President tried to dismiss it. “I am afraid,” he said, “that I have done wrong to mention the subject at all. But somehow, the thing has gotten possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.”
    He tried to talk of other things. Mrs. Lincoln would not be put off. She asked about the dream. Mr. Lincoln’s face settled again in melancholy and he agreed to tell about it.
    â€œAbout ten days ago, * I retired very late. I had been waiting up for important dispatches. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon beganto dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.
    â€œThere the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me, but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?
    â€œI was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived in the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed