At last, the daughter of the victim made her way to the very threshold of the President's room. Frenzied with grief she assailed the portal with her cries for admission to plead for her dying mother. She was denied admittance. In the extremity of her despair she lay down upon the steps, and, in the name of God, appealed to the President and to the wardens, only to listen to her prayer. The grim guardians of the door held it shut in her face. Denied, thus, even an appeal to Executive clemency, the friends of the poor woman, as a last most desperate resort, invoked the Constitution of their and her country through the historic writ of Habeas Corpus. On the morning of the day of the execution, they found a judge (Judge Wylie; all honor to his memory!) who had the independence and courage to grant the writ. At half-past eleven, General Hancock appeared before the Judge and made return that by order of the President the Habeas Corpus was suspended and therefore he did not produce the body. The order of the President dated ten o'clock, same morning, was annexed to the return and directed the General to proceed with the execution. No sooner had the guarantees of the Constitution been, thus, finally set at naught, than the cell-doors were thrown open and the prisoners summoned to their doom. As the enfeebled widow raised her trembling limbs from off the coarse mattress which alone separated her body from the stone floor of her dungeon, she strove, in broken words, to assure the soldiers, who had come to bind her arms behind her back and tie cords around her skirts above and below the knee, of her utter, yet helpless innocence. Her confessor, who stood by her until the last, gently pointed out to her the uselessness of such appeals, at such a moment, and directed her hopes towards Heaven.