"with his own hand" he writes out the death warrant. As this includes the approval of the sentences, the appointment of the day and hour of execution, and the designation of the place of confinement of those condemned to imprisonment, the bottom of the page is reached before he completes his task. If he had turned up the page and continued his writing on the obverse side from the bottom down, as all the foregoing had been written, then the petition of mercy, unaddressed as it was, would have been, if still attached, directly beneath the eye of the President as he signed the death-warrant. But, as now appears from the record itself, the careful Judge-Advocate did not turn up the page from the bottom. On the contrary, reverting to the layman's way of writing papers, he whisks the whole record over, and continues the writing of the death-warrant on the back of the last half-sheet of the record _from the top to the bottom_--by this change of method, either throwing the petition under the leaves of the record, or, if disengaged, leaving it _upside down_. When he has thus finished his draft he shoves it over to the President. The President signs it with tremulous hand. The "confidential interview" is at an end; and the Judge-Advocate, taking up the papers, hurries out and over to the Department of War. At this moment the petition disappears from view. We hear no more of it. Thrust as a convenient succedaneum into the hands of the majority of the Commission, ignored, suppressed or slurred over when before the President, it had served its pitiful purpose. Neither the Adjutant-General nor any of his clerks, appear to have noticed it, although the record must have been copied more than once in his office. It seems to have sunk suddenly into oblivion; its very existence became the subject of dispute. It was omitted from the authorized published proceedings of the Commission. It was omitted from the annual report of the Judge-Advocate. The disloyal paper must have been laid alongside the suppressed "Diary," there to repose unseen until the Impeachment of Johnson and the Trial of Surratt summoned them together into the light of day. * * * * * On the morning of Thursday, the sixth day of July, the six days ominous silence of the War-Department is broken. An order issues from the Adjutant-General's office which, bearing date the day before and reciting the findings and death-sentences of the Commission and the death-warrant of the President, commands Major-General Hancock to see execution done, on the seventh, between the hours of ten and two.