PRESIDENT GARFIELD'S DEATH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6214, 17 October 1881, Page 5

PRESIDENT GARFIELD'S DEATH.

President Garfield died at Elberon, Long Branch, New Jersey, at 10.35 p.m., on the 19th September. He had been taken there on the 6th inst. more as a forlorn hope than from any belief in the possibility of his recovery. Pya;mia had even then set its seal upon him, and glandular abscesses, aggravated with lung troubles, and finally supposed embolism of the heart, carried off the heroic sufferer in the seventy-ninth day of his martyrdom. The closing scene is thus aptly described :—

"At the President's bedside, holding his poor emaciated hand in her own, and watching, with anguish unutterable, the fast vanishing sands of life, sat the faithful, devoted wife, during the last hours of the President's career. Around him were other weeping friends and the physicians, lamenting their powerlessueas in the presence of the Angel of Death. Toward the last the mind of the sufferer wandered. He was once more back in Mentor, amid those scenes where the happiest hours of his life were spent. He sat in the dear old homestead again with his loved ones around him—the aged mother, so proud of her big boy, faithful wife, beloved children. It was a blissful dream, thafrobbed deathof its terrors, and rendered the dying man for the moment unconscious of the cruel rending of his once vigorous frame that was constantly going on. The moan of the restless ocean mingled with the sobs of the loved ones as the lamp of life flickered and went out forever. Nearly everyone around the President clung to hope to the last, and refused to believe the approach of death, uutrl the shadow deepened, and the Destroyer's presence could be no longer unfelt. The struggle is over, and death is victor."

"Hung be the heavens in black" fitly expresses our condition. Everywhere the emblems of mourning are visible, and citizens of every creed, class, condition, and party regard his untimely taking off as a personal bereavement. To none but the Chief Magistrate of the Great Republic could these affectionate sentiments be displayed. Rising by his own superb manhood from grinding poverty to the chieftainship of the nation, he represented Americanism pure and simple. The official autopsy found that the ball, after fracturing the right eleventh rib, had passed through the spinal column, in front of the spinal canal, fracturing the base of the first lumbar vertebra?, driving a number of small fragments of bone into the adjacent soft parts, and lodging just below the pancreas, about two inches and a half to the left of the spine and behind the peritoneum, where it had become completely encysted. The immediate cause of the death was secondary hemorrhage from one of the meseratic arteries adjoining the track of the ball, the blood rupturing the peritoneum, and nearly half a pint escaping into the abdominal cavity. An abscess cavity, six inches by four, was found in the vicinity of the gall bladder, between the liver and transverse colon, which were strongly interadherent. A long suppurating channel —due to the burrowing of the pus—extended from the external wound, being in the loin muscles and right kidney, almost to the right groin. Evidences of severe bronchitis were found, and broncho-pneumonia of the l'Lht lung (the lower portions), and though much less in extent of the left lung, it contained no abscesses, and the heart no clots. The only other organ affected was the left kidney, which contaiued a small abscess, near its surface, about one-third of an inch in diameter.

- General Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as President, at his residence in New York, by Judge Brady of the State Supreme Court, on the 20th inst. Queen Victoria telegraphs to Mrs. Garfield, " Words cannot express the deep sympathy I feel with you. May God support and comfort you, as He alone can !" The Prince and Princess of Wales also express their condolence to Minister Lowell, and the popular sympathy throughout the British Isles, as voiced by the Press, is deep, heartfelt, and has drawn both nations closer together.