... Such the wild scene, or a suggestion of it
rather, inside the play-house that night.
Outside, too, in the atmosphere of shock and craze, crowds of people,
fill'd with frenzy, ready to seize any outlet for it, come near
committing murder several times on innocent individuals. One such case
was especially exciting. The infuriated crowd, through some chance,
got started against one man, either for words he utter'd, or perhaps
without any cause at all, and were proceeding at once to actually hang
him on a neighboring lamp-post, when he was rescued by a few heroic
policemen, who placed him in their midst, and fought their way slowly
and amid great peril toward the station house. It was a fitting
episode of the whole affair. The crowd rushing and eddying to and
fro--the night, the yells, the pale faces, many frighten'd people
trying in vain to extricate themselves--the attack'd man, not yet
freed from the jaws of death, looking like a corpse--the silent,
resolute, half-dozen policemen, with no weapons but their little
clubs, yet stern and steady through all those eddying swarms--made a
fitting side-scene to the grand tragedy of the murder. They gain'd the
station house with the protected man, whom they placed in security for
the night, and discharged him in the morning.
And in the midst of that pandemonium, infuriated soldiers, the
audience and the crowd, the stage, and all its actors and actresses,
its paint-pots, spangles, and gas-lights--the life blood from those
veins, the best and sweetest of the land, drips slowly down, and
death's ooze already begins its little bubbles on the lips.
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