“That is fair,” he said.  “I cannot ask anything more.  I am obliged to you for coming to see me.  My intention was to purchase a place in the burial-ground, and have them put into a coffin and carried in a hearse.  I might do it without any one’s knowing that it was not a human body.  Would you assist me, then?”

“But if no one knew it,” I said, “how would it be a public testimony against the destruction of life?”

“True, it would not.  Well, I will consider what to do.  Perhaps I may wish to bury them privately in some garden.”

“In that case,” said I, “I will find you a place in the grounds of some of my friends.”

He thanked me, and I took my leave,—­exceedingly astonished and amused by the incident, but also interested in the earnestness of conviction of the man.

I heard, in a day or two, that he had actually purchased a lot in the cemetery, two or three miles below the city, that he had had a coffin made, hired a hearse and carriage, and had gone through all the solemnity of a regular funeral.  For several days he continued to visit the grave of his little friends, and mourned over them with a grief which did not seem at all theatrical.

Meantime he acted every night at the theatre, and my friends told me that his acting was of unsurpassed excellence.  A vein of insanity began, however, to mingle in his conduct.  His fellow-actors were afraid of him.  He looked terribly in earnest on the stage; and when he went behind the scenes, he spoke to no one, but sat still, looking sternly at the ground.  During the day he walked about town, giving apples to the horses, and talked to the drivers, urging them to treat their animals with kindness.

An incident happened, one day, which illustrated still further his sympathy for the humbler races of animals.  One of the sudden freshets which come to the Ohio, caused commonly by heavy rains melting the snow in the valleys of its tributary streams, had raised the river to an unusual height.  The yellow torrent rushed along its channel, bearing on its surface logs, boards, and the debris of fences, shanties, and lumber-yards.  A steamboat, forced by the rapid current against the stone landing, had been stove, and lay a wreck on the bottom, with the water rising rapidly around it.  A horse had been left, fastened on the boat, and it looked as if he would be drowned.  Booth was on the landing, and he took from his pocket twenty dollars, and offered it to any one who would get to the boat and cut the halter, so that the horse might swim ashore.  Some one was found to do it, and the horse’s life was saved.

So this golden thread of human sympathy with all creatures whom God had made ran through the darkening moods of his genius.  He had well laid to heart the fine moral of his favorite poem,—­that

  “He prayeth well, who loveth well
  Both man, and bird, and beast.

  “He prayeth best, who loveth best
  All things, both great and small;
  For the dear God, who loveth us,
  He made and loveth all.”