by explaining such suspicious circumstances as the frequent rendezvous of Booth, Payne and others at Mrs. Surratt's house, which practice, as it was proved, ceased altogether on the fall of Richmond and the immediate departure of the son to Canada. To the Judge-Advocates, if not to the Court, any evidence looking towards innocence was most distasteful and unwelcome. They were in no mood to reconcile what they considered the damning proofs of a conspiracy to kill their "beloved Commander-in-Chief" with the innocence of the fettered culprits before them, by admitting a plot to capture, into which nevertheless those same proofs fitted with surprising consistency. Besides, in the eyes of Bingham and Holt, complicity in a plot to capture, although unexecuted, was proof of complicity in the plot to murder, and also of itself deserved death. In this direction, therefore, the Judge-Advocates were mole-eyed. On the contrary, they hailed the slightest indication of guilt with a glow of triumph. In the direction of guilt, they were lynx-eyed. Consequently, they bent every energy to identify the plot to capture with the plot to kill. They introduced anonymous letters, dropped letters; a letter mailed nearly a month after the assassination directed to J. W. B.; a letter in cipher, purporting to be dated the day after the assassination, addressed to John W. Wise, signed "No Five," found floating in the water at Morehead City, North Carolina, as late as the first of May; this last, the most flagrant violation and cynical disregard of the law of evidence on record. They did more. They labored to keep out all reference to the plot to capture. And it was for this reason, that the Judge-Advocates deliberately suppressed the diary found on the body of Booth. Its contents demonstrated the existence of the plot to capture. Instead of allowing the officer who testified to the articles taken from the dead body of Booth to make a detailed statement in response to one general question as to what they were, the examining counsel shows him first the knife, then the pistols, then the belt and holster, then a file with a cork at one end, then a spur, then the carbine, then the bills of exchange, then the pocket-compass; following the exhibition of every article with the interrogatory, "Did you take this from the corpse of the actor?" But no diary was exhibited or even spoken of, although, as has been mentioned, it was carried by this same officer and Colonel Baker to Secretary Stanton on the night following the capture. That these Judge-Advocates had carefully searched through the diary for items they could use against the prisoners, is shown by their calling one of the proprietors of the "National Intelligencer," as a witness, to contradict the statement that Booth had left a written article, setting forth the reasons for his crime, for publication in that paper--a statement found only in the diary whose very existence they kept secret.