been found who could declare any appearance of the nursing or mysteriously discussing of anything like conspiracy within the walls of Mrs. Surratt’s house.  Even if the son of Mrs. Surratt, from the significancies of associations, is to be classed with the conspirators, if such a body existed, it is monstrous to suppose that the son would weave a net of circumstantial evidences around the dwelling of his widowed mother, were he never so reckless and sin-determined; and that they (the mother and the son) joined hands in such dreadful pact, is a thought more monstrous still!

A mother and son associate in crime, and such a crime as this, which half of the civilized world never saw matched in all its dreadful bearings!  Our judgments can have hardly recovered their unprejudiced poise since the shock of the late horror, if we can contemplate with credulity such a picture, conjured by the unjust spirits of indiscriminate accusation and revenge.  A crime which, in its public magnitude, added to its private misery, would have driven even the Atis-haunted heart of a Medici, a Borgia, or a Madame Bocarme to wild confession before its accomplishment, and daunted even that soul, of all the recorded world the most eager for novelty in license, and most unshrinking in sin—­the indurated soul of Christina of Sweden; such a crime the profoundest plotters within padded walls would scarcely dare whisper; the words forming the expression of which, spoken aloud in the upper air, would convert all listening boughs to aspens, and all glad sounds of nature to shuddering wails.  And this made known, even surmised, to a woman a materfamilias the good genius, the placens uxor of a home where children had gathered all the influences of purity and the reminiscences of innocence, where religion watched, and the Church was minister and teacher!

Who—­were circumstantial evidence strong and conclusive, such as only time and the slow-weaving fates could elucidate and deny—­who will believe, when the mists of uncertainty which cloud the present shall have dissolved, that a woman born and bred in respectability and competence—­a Christian mother, and a citizen who never offended the laws of civil propriety; whose unfailing attention to the most sacred duties of life has won for her the name of “a proper Christian matron”; whose heart was ever warmed by charity; whose door unbarred to the poor; and whose Penates had never cause to veil their faces—­who will believe that she could so suddenly and so fully have learned the intricate arts of sin?  A daughter of the South, her life associations confirming her natal predilections, her individual preferences inclined, without logic or question, to the Southern people, but with no consciousness nor intent of disloyalty to her government, and causing no exclusion from her friendship and active favors of the people of the loyal North, nor repugnance in the distribution among our Union soldiery of all needed comforts, and on all occasions.