Had she really
been engaged in assisting in the great crime, which makes an epoch
in our country's history, her only object and most anxious wish
would have been to see Lloyd. It was no ruse to transact important
business there to cover up what the uncharitable would call the real
business. Calvert's letter was received by her on the forenoon of
the fourteenth, and long before she saw Booth that day, or even
before Booth knew that the President would be at the theatre that
night, Mrs. Surratt had disclosed her intention to go to
Surrattsville, and had she been one moment earlier in her start she
would not have seen Booth at all. All these things furnish powerful
presumptions in favor of the theory that, if she delivered the
message at all, it was done innocently.

In regard to the nonrecognition of Payne, the third fact adduced by
the prosecution against Mrs. Surratt, we incline to the opinion
that, to all minds not forejudging, the testimony of Miss Anna
E. Surratt, and various friends and servants of Mrs. Surratt,
relative to physical causes, might fully explain and account for
such ocular remissness and failure. In times and on occasions of
casual meeting of intimate acquaintances on the street, and of
common need for domestic uses, the eyesight of Mrs. Surratt had
proved treacherous and failing. How much more liable to fail her
was her imperfect vision on an occasion of excitement and anxiety,
like the night of her arrest and the disturbance of her household by
military officers, and when the person with whom she was confronted
was transfigured by a disguise which varied from the one in which
she had previously met him, with all the wide difference between a
Baptist parson and an earth-soiled, uncouthly-dressed digger of
gutters! Anna E. Surratt, Emma Offutt, Anna Ward, Elize Holohan,
Honora Fitzpatrick, and a servant, attest to all the visual
incapacity of Mrs. Surratt, and the annoyance she experienced
therefrom in passing friends without recognition in the daytime, and
from inability to sew or read even on a dark day, as well as at
night. The priests of her church, and gentlemen who have been
friendly and neighborhood acquaintances of Mrs. Surratt for many
years, bear witness to her untarnished name, to her discreet and
Christian character, to the absence of all imputation of disloyalty,
to her character for patriotism. Friends and servants attest to her
voluntary and gratuitous beneficence to our soldi