Lincoln's Conspirators

A correspondent of the Boston sends to that paper the following interesting article: "As a newspaper correspondent, I had occasion to visit the oíd Capítol Prison in Washington, in February, 1869, to witness the exhumation and rendition to their respective relatives and friends of the remains of the conspifators in the Lincoln assas3ination. President Johnson was about to go out of office, and he issued an order permitting ehristian burial to the bodies of flve persons implicated in the death of Lincoln - Booth, Mrs. Surratt, Atzerodt, Payne and Herold. They had been buried in ammunition boxes of coramon pine wood, six feet long, two feet wide, and two deep. When the lid was lifted from Booth's coffin, his face was perfect, with the exception of a small hole about the size of a di me in each cheek. Ilis hair was in as good eondition as if he had just come out of a barber's shop. In takin'g out the body to place it in a handsome rosewood coflln supplied by his mother, Mrs. Booth, of Baltimore, the head dropped off from the body. Not so with Mrs. Surratt. Her face and form were perfect, and she Jooked like one in a happy, dreamless sleep. Her head tdhered to the body in the procesa of the transfer. Payne's body was greatly wasted, but Atzerodt's was the worst of all ; f or when the army blanket that covered his remains was lifted up it revealed a shapeless mass of blackened bones and ashes, with a bald and separated skull in one corner. Talking of this matter of the Lincoln assassination, I remember asking Andrew Johnson one day when we were traveüng through East ïennessee, at a time when he was running f or Congressman-at-large against Horace Maynard. and Frank Oheatham, why it was that he did not pardon Mrs. Surratt. He was in a communicative mood, and he said: "The true history of that case has never been told. It was represented in the papers that I ref used to see Annie Surratt (the daughter of Mrs. Surratt, when she came to the White House the morning of the execution, asking for the pardon of her mother. The tact is, that I never knew it was Miss Surratt, because a man named Muzzy, who had general charge of the White House, came to me and said that a crazy woman was down stairs, and wanted to get in and see me, and she wouldn't give her narae, but was crying and tearing her hair, and exhibiting all the evidences of insanity." "But would you have pardoned Mrs. Surratt," I asked, " supposing you had known better ?" "I might have," he replied, in his bluff way; "she didn't do the snooting, but was an accessory to it.'" James Gordon Bennet has the inindsomest, largest, and finest private yacht in the world, better than royalty coinmands, and now he has puröhased four formidable Hotchkiss rifled cannon for its decks. Is James going to vary the monutony of life by becoming a pírate ?