The natural construction of Bingham's letter would lead us to believe that the Cabinet meeting, which the two Secretaries are said to have described, was a regular consultation between "the President and his advisers," held _before_ the "confidential interview" at which the President "approved the death-sentence;" and that the entire Cabinet voted on the question raised by the petition, because it was "a unit in denying the prayer." This is but another version of the "full Cabinet" of Judge Pierrepont's first statement, and forcibly suggests that the two have an identical origin--at first withdrawn under compulsion while Seward lived, at last brought forward again after his death. And every one, on such construction, would expect to hear the voices of McCulloch, Welles and Dennison, still living in 1873, and accessible to the ex-Judge-Advocate. He states in his "Refutation," that he "had satisfactory reasons for believing that they were not there;" but he could not have gathered those reasons from Judge Bingham or his letter, which really is only consistent with the presence of some, if not all, of the three; and it is naturally to be inferred he got them from the ex-members themselves in letters repudiating all knowledge of the petition;--letters he takes care not to publish. Again: the Cabinet meeting described in Judge Bingham's letter cannot be made to square with the meeting described in the letter of Judge Harlan. The former was a regular Cabinet meeting, the latter was an informal discussion by a few members of the Cabinet. At the one, the petition was "duly considered," at the other, neither record nor petition was present. At the one, "a formal vote" was taken upon the "question as to Mrs. Surratt's case;" at the latter, her case "was never submitted to a formal vote." But--not to dwell further on dispensable points--it is enough to say that _any_ Cabinet meeting whatever, for the consideration of the petition, held _before_ the President's approval of the death-sentence, is, on the admitted facts of the case, an impossibility. Indeed Holt himself, when driven to the question, does not claim that there was. The record was in the custody of the Judge-Advocate from the 30th of June until that officer carried it to the President on the 5th of July, and during that interval the President was sick-a-bed. It was General Holt, as he himself states, who first "drew his attention to the recommendation," and "the President then and there read it in my (his) presence." And this was at the confidential interview on Wednesday, July 5th. There could have been no meeting of the President and his Cabinet at which the record and petition were present and discussed, "before the approval of the death-sentence;" which confessedly was done at the confidential interview.