The statement will be remembered in the commencing part of the proceedings of the trial that no ordinary amount of astonishment was experienced by the defendant when Bentonville Taylor was called into court as one of the principal witnesses for the prosecution. The defendant well knowing the character of this man, he lost no time for getting the most substantial of testimony touching his notorious reputation. This testimony has been held in reserve up to the present period for reasons which will be given presently. In Shoemake’s evidence, the prosecution sustained such an overwhelming defeat that it refrained from calling up another of the same type for that time. As before stated, Bentonville Taylor was brought from Williamsburg, Covington county, Miss. The nature of his testimony, intended to be given in court, was immediately learned afterward by his card published in one of the Mobile newspapers. The substance of this card was to the effect that the names given in the confessions were forged by the defendant, and that Copeland himself was insane at the time he made the confessions, and the same entirely unworthy of any credit whatever either in public or private. It was thought at the time that Bentonville Taylor was to be used in the other two cases of Moulton and Cleaveland against the defendant to be afterward tried. This is one reason why the documents pertaining to Bentonville Taylor have so long been withheld. Another is, it is always painful, in the absence of imperative necessity, to make public such considerations as, under other circumstances, might be better enveloped in silence; but when charges of forgery have been made, and that the whole confessions are entirely unworthy of credit, then it becomes an absolute necessity to know something of the man who has had the audacity to make such charges. First will be given some extracts from a letter which was intended for publication at the time, but on more mature thought was decided to be suppressed for the same reasons as just given. This letter is now in the hands of the defendant, the severer parts of which will still be suppressed for humanity’s sake: