who had been the willing and paid tools to build it up, were about to be unmasked and their poisoned fangs drawn. After no great interval, Conover was, in fact, convicted of perjury in another case, and sentenced to imprisonment in the Albany penitentiary. The whole prosecution of the so-called conspirators, from its inception to its tragic close, turned out to have been founded on an enormous blunder. The findings of the Commission were falsified. Whatever the guilt of the doomed victims, they were not guilty of the crime of which they were convicted. The terrible conspiracy, stretching from Richmond to Canada, and from Canada back to Washington, involving statesmen and generals, and crowning the wickedness of rebellion with the Medusa-head of assassination, shrank into the comparatively common-place and isolated offense of the murder of Lincoln and the assault upon Seward, suddenly concocted by Booth, on the afternoon of the 14th of April, in wild despair over the collapse of the rebellion. In such a predicament, the hanging of Mrs. Surratt could not have been a pleasing reminiscence to the Secretary of War, to Judge-Advocate Holt, or to the hangers-on of the Bureau of Military Justice. At such a moment they certainly had no use for her son John. On the 12th of November, Preston King, who held one side of the door of the White House while the daughter of Mrs. Surratt pleaded for admission, walked off a ferry-boat into the Hudson River, with two bags of shot in the pockets of his overcoat, and was seen no more. This event might have passed as a startling coincidence, to be interpreted according to the feelings of the hearer, had it not been followed by the suicide of Senator James S. Lane, who held the other side of the door, and who, on the 11th day of July, 1866, blew his brains out on the plains of Kansas. That these two men had together stood between the President and the filial suppliant for mercy, in a case of life and death, and that, then, within a year, both had perished by their own hands, aroused whispers in the air, caused a holding of the breath and a listening, as if to catch the faint but increasing cry of innocent blood, coming up from the ground.