II.THE INCIDENTS.
Two months previous to the murder of the Joyce children I had been residing at the house of an acquaintance, a mile away from the village of Jamaica Plain. The front of the house looked out upon the road leading from Boston and passing through the village of Jamaica Plain far away into the back country, and onward,—a pleasant drive for those city dwellers who had only afternoon opportunities for rural inhalation. The rear of the house gave view of a meadow watered by a tiny rivulet and up to the woods of Bussey. This rivulet was the one that went by the body of the boy, and where it was concealed by its woods and weeds. The distance from our back porch to the spot where the body of the boy was found, was about four hundred yards, and to where the body of the girl was discovered, probably twice or thrice that number; so I was rusticating near the footlights of the theatre, little dreaming that, when the curtain rose, how terrible would be the drama that would drip the stage with blood.
I have long since made up my mind that the mostextraordinary events transpire from a condition of repose, else we would never be startled. The first earthquake is the terror; the residue are but affairs of mercantile and architectural speculation. Whatever is striking is struck quick. The practice of the prize ring is the theory of wonders. The shoulder of a man propels a complex system of muscles, and a man in front has his countenance smashed. The suddenness of the experiment accounts for the surprise at its result. Preparations for great deeds are not always apparent. A coup d’etat is such because it is a coup. The killing of Mr. Lincoln was more astounding as a positive deed than the beheading of Charles the First, or the razoring of Louis the Sixteenth and his Queen, daughter of the Cæsars. In the case of the President, silence and mystery kept pace with the public confidence in his personal safety; in the case of Charles and Louis, the politics of a people had long been disturbed and outraged with regard to the traditional sanctity of kings, and there was preparation almost evidently looking to the final result, and the prelude, from the very nature of those governments, admitted of hardly any other epilogue; but with Mr. Lincoln it was different. He sat in his box at the theatre, secure, in a war brought to a result suitable to his designs, with pleasant painted scenery before him, a comedy of brimming humor in course of acting, altogether in thevery last place he or any one expected that the blow upon his life would fall; but it fell, and the world was astonished. Thus,—with the meadow and its brook before me, with the grand belt of woods bowing over the fence, with the soft air of summer in the boughs, with the mowers in the grass, with the sunlight blinking through flower-stems and vegetables of homely nomenclature, but admirable qualities,—I sat in the porch of my summer dwelling; and while I sat there, musing and idling, a deed was done, so wicked, so ruthless, so hideously unessential, that even now, after the lapse of so long a time, I feel the need of a new word,—a word with the thunder and the lightning in it, with the curse of man and the anathema of God in it, to express the sensation it produced.
Those woods were to me a delight beyond all computation. To look at them, to go into them, to sit underneath them, to watch by the hour the veins of moss and the bark of the tree boles, to follow the curvature of the limbs as they grasped at the white clouds passing, to see the blue eyes of the sky peeping at me as I stared at them, to listen to the nothings of sounds that all men have heard in the sylvans, to forget in the balm of the scene the bitterness of memories and knowledge,—furnished me a mighty feast of harmless and negative enjoyment. With these feelings which I have not exaggerated,—keeping in view this sanctity ofnature, for so many centuries uninvaded by any crime, save and except that doubtful one, of lovers meeting there to love outside of domestic parlors,—I perhaps more than anybody else was personally outraged at the act which not only destroyed human life, but smote the peace of the presence which Heaven had bestowed upon the scene, sublime in its ministering to a waif out of the wreck of revolution. I feel confident that to those persons who indulge in the faculty of thought beyond counters and desks, I need make no excuses for these digressions; for they will at once perceive that I am at least exhibiting one phase of the prelude to those terrible atrocities. The incident of my vicinity to the spot has great weight with me in the writing of this narrative, as it would be to those persons, who, though not being able to witness the actual battle, see the smoke of the conflict and hear the reverberation of the dread artillery.