As the prisoner entered the court and advanced to the bar, no clank of fetters jarred upon the ear; and, as he sat at his ease by the side of his counsel, like a man presumed to be innocent, the recollection of that wan group of culprits, loaded down with iron, as they crouched before their imperious doomsmen, must have aroused a righteous wrath over the barbarous procedure of the military, in comparison with the benign rules of the civil, tribunals. The atmosphere surrounding the court and the trial seemed, also, to be free from passion and prejudice, when contrasted with the tremendous excitement and the thirst for blood, which permeated the surroundings of the Military Commission. Although the Bureau of Military Justice had busied itself in the prosecution, and thrust its aid on the office of the District Attorney; although the whole weight of the federal administration was thrown in the same direction to vindicate, if possible, the signature of the President to the death warrant of the victims of his military court; and notwithstanding the presence upon the bench of a judge "organized to convict:" still, so repellant to partial passion were the precincts of what might fitly be styled a temple of justice, a neutral spectator might feel reliance that in that chamber innocence was safe. But there was one sentiment hovering over the trial and dwelling in all bosoms, which clothed the proceedings with a peculiar awfulness. All felt that the dead mother was on trial with the living son. She had been executed two years before for the same crime with which he was now charged. And, as he stood in the flesh, with upraised hand, looking at the jury which held his life in its hands, it required no great effort of fancy to body forth the image of his mother, standing beside him, murmuring from shadowy lips the plea of not guilty, amid the feeble repetitions of which, to her priest, she had died upon the scaffold. To convict her son, now, by the unanimous verdict of twelve men, and punish him according to law, would go far to condone the unconstitutional trial and illegal execution of the mother. Whereas, on the other hand, the acquittal of her son of the same crime, by the constitutional tribunals of the country, would forever brand the acts of the Military Commission as murder under the forms of military rule. This dread alternative met the prosecution at the threshold of the trial, oppressed them with its increasing weight during its progress, and tarried with them even at its close. It appeared in the indictment, where the name of the mother, as one of the conspirators, was associated with the name of her son. It appeared in the examination of the jurors, when Judge Pierrepont endeavored to extract from them whether they had formed or expressed an opinion as to the guilt or the innocence of the prisoner, not only, but also as to the guilt or the innocence of his mother. It appeared during the taking of