Edwin Booth, the tragedian, brother of the regicide Wilkes, was at a
friend's house. By the purest chance, dallying over the knickknacks,
he picked up a plaster-cast of a hand. It was something more than a
paper-weight, he was intuitively prompted, for he said, handling it
reverently as Yorick's relict:

"By the way, whose is this?"

Before the cue could be given to hush or utter a subterfuge, some one
blurted out:

"Abraham Lincoln's! Don't you know?"

"The murder was out!" and the distinguished guest, who suffered a long
term for a crime wholly out of his ken, was silent for the
evening.--(W. D. Howells.)


* * * * *


THIS CLINCHES IT.

A party accompanying the President to the ground to see experiments
with new ordnance in the Navy Yard, in 1862, were diverted by his
taking up a ship-carpenter's ax from its nick in a spar, and holding
it out by the end of the handle; a feat that none of the group could
imitate.