on her knees. She always came forth with shining face and with
soft words on her lips.

She struggled for two months in vain efforts to obtain a single interview
with him, or to obtain a copy of the charges. Doctor Cameron had been
placed in the old Capitol Prison, already crowded to the utmost. He was in
delicate health, and so ill when she had left home he could not accompany
her to Richmond.

Not a written or spoken word was allowed to pass those prison doors. She
could communicate with him only through the officers in charge. Every
message from him was the same. "I love you always. Do not worry. Go home
the moment you can leave Ben. I fear the worst at Piedmont."

When he had sent this message, he would sit down and write the truth in a
little diary he kept:

"Another day of anguish. How long, O Lord? Just one touch of her hand, one
last pressure of her lips, and I am content. I have no desire to live--I
am tired."

The officers repeated the verbal messages, but they made no impression on
Mrs. Cameron. By a mental telepathy which had always linked her life with
his her soul had passed those prison bars. If he had written the pitiful
record with a dagger's point on her heart, she could not have felt it more
keenly.

At times overwhelmed, she lay prostrate and sobbed in half-articulate
cries. And then from the silence and mystery of the spirit world in which
she felt the beat of the heart of Eternal Love would come again the
strange peace that passeth understanding. She would rise and go forth to
her task with a smile.

In July she saw Mrs. Surratt taken from this old Capitol Prison to be hung
with Payne, Herold, and Atzerodt for complicity in the assassination. The
military commission before whom this farce of justice was enacted,
suspicious of the testimony of the perjured wretches who had sworn her
life away, had filed a memorandum with their verdict asking the President
for mercy.

President Johnson never saw this memorandum. It was secretly removed in
the War Department, and only replaced after he had signed the death
warrant.

In vain Annie Surratt, the weeping daughter, flung herself on the steps of
the White House on the fatal day, begging and praying to see the
President. She could not believe they would allow her mother to be
murdered in the face of a recommendation of mercy. The fatal hour struck
at last, and the girl left the White House with set eyes and blanched
face, muttering incoherent cur