The new trial was in fact at hand. In the summer of the year 1867, the interest excited by the investigation of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, referred to in the last chapter, suddenly became merged into the intenser and more widespread interest excited by the trial of John H. Surratt in the Criminal Court of the District of Columbia. Surratt, after escaping from his captors in Italy by leaping down a precipice, fled to Malta and thence to Alexandria, where, on the 21st of December, 1866, he was recaptured and taken on board the United States vessel "Swatara." In this vessel, bound hand and foot, the prisoner arrived at Washington on the 21st of February following. Thus the radicals in Congress, impelled by their growing enmity to the President over the reconstruction contest, by scattering abroad sinister intimations that the cause of his remissness in bringing to punishment the accomplices of the convicted assassins was fear for himself of a full investigation of the assassination, succeeded at last in forcing the Executive Department, apprehensive, as it had good reason to be, of the shadows which any future trial in the civil courts was likely to reflect back upon the Military Commission, and aware of the breaking down of the case against the Canadian confederates and Jefferson Davis, face to face with the necessity of ratifying the conviction of the mother by securing the conviction of the son. On the one hand, the radicals, in blind ignorance of the true inwardness of affairs, clamored for the trial, in the hope that the guilt of the prisoner's supposed accomplices, Davis and Company, and possibly of the President himself, might be detected. On the other hand, the administration, now that the man had been forced upon its hands, knowing the futility of the hope of its enemies, pushed on the trial in the hope that, with its powerful appliances, a result could be obtained which would vindicate the verdict of the Military Commission. No one on either side, however, so much as dreamed of renewing the iniquity of a trial by court-martial. Amid the silence of the Holts and the Binghams and the Stantons, Surratt was duly indicted by a grand jury for the murder of "one Abraham Lincoln," and for conspiring with Booth, Payne, Atzerodt, Herold and Mary E. Surratt to murder "one Abraham Lincoln," which conspiracy was executed by Booth. There was no averment about the traitorous conspiracy to murder the heads of Government, in aid of the rebellion; nor were the names of Dr. Mudd, O'Laughlin, Arnold or Spangler, then undergoing punishment on the Dry Tortugas, inserted as parties to the conspiracy; nor was any mention made of Seward or Johnson or Grant, as among the contemplated victims. All was precise and perspicacious, as is required in pleadings in the civil courts. The loose, vague, indefinite and impalpable charges permissible, seemingly, on military trials, gave place to plain