uncompromising for blood. The whole scheme proceeded from a quarter outside the Court--a quarter which, on the one hand, was possessed by an overmastering revengeful passion, such as was required to point the five officers to a seeming source of mercy to which they might appeal and thus avoid the exercise of their own prerogative in antagonism to their four brethren, and, on the other hand, harbored some secret knowledge or malign intent that the petition would or should be, in fact, an empty form; from a quarter, in short, where the desire for the condemnation to death of Mrs. Surratt was all-controlling and where the condition of the President was well known. They, who suggested the death-sentence and the petition as a substitute for the milder penalty, were surely all on the side of death, and hoped, if they did not believe, that the prayer of the petition would be of no avail; else they would not have adopted such a circuitous method to do what the five officers could immediately have accomplished themselves. In one word, the contrivers of the device of petition were not those who desired to save the bare life of the convicted she-conspirator, but were those who would be satisfied with nothing less than her death on the scaffold. The suggestion was wholly sinister and malevolent. On the other hand, the majority of the Court did really desire that her punishment should not exceed that of Arnold, O'Laughlin and Mudd, and they certainly would never have had recourse to a petition to the President, had they not been cheated into believing that that method of proceeding was likely to effectuate what they had full power to do. Never would these five soldiers, or any two of them, have given their voices for the death of this woman, had they dreamed for a moment that their signing of the petition was, and was meant to be, but a farce. They would not have played such a ghastly trick under the shadow of the gibbet. Accordingly, when the Commission reassembled, either after recess or adjournment, the reinvigorated counsellors immediately unfolded their plan. We can almost hear their voices, in that upper room of the Old Penitentiary, as they alternately urge on the Court. Holt, making a merit of yielding in the cases of Spangler, of O'Laughlin, of Arnold and of Mudd, denounces the universal disloyalty of the women of the South, and pleads the necessity of an example. Bingham, holding up both mother and son as equally deep-dyed in blood with Booth and Payne, both insinuates and threatens at the same time, that, if "_tenderness_," forsooth, is to be shown because of the age and sex of such a she-assassin, then, for the sake of the blood of their murdered Commander-in-Chief, do not his own soldiers show it, but let his successor take the fearful responsibility.