TON, D.C., April 12, 1893.

My dear good friend:

I regret much to be obliged to communicate with you by the
hand of another, but my poor life seems to be fixed by fate
on the down grade, and at present there is no encouragement
to believe that the future has anything better in store for
me.

I send you a number of the North American Review containing
the correspondence to which you refer between General Speed
and myself. In it there is also a detached printed letter of
Colonel Brown which is important. And I must ask that both
this letter and the number of the Review be carefully
preserved and after their perusal by your friend be returned
to me, as I have no other copies and wish to preserve these.
I am sorry that the sad circumstances of my condition
prevent me from thanking you in person for your continued
interest in my reputation which has been so basely assailed,
but I trust as triumphantly vindicated.

I thank you sincerely for what you have said of Mrs. Kearny.
It would be a great gratification to me to have an interview
with her on the long, long ago, but this is a pleasure which
I now have no encouragement to promise myself.

Believe me most grateful for the repeated calls and
inquiries as to my health which you have been so good as to
make. Such calls are precious fountains of consolation that
will not go dry.

Very sincerely your friend,

J. HOLT.

It has been asserted upon high authority that after the conviction and
sentence of Mrs. Surratt her daughter Anna, as well as Catholic priests
and prominent men in Washington, attempted to see the President in order
to intercede for executive clemency in her behalf, but were denied
admission by Preston King, Collector of the Port of New York and then a
guest at the White House, and by U.S. Senator James Lane of Kansas. It
has also been said that Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas succeeded in reaching
the President by pushing herself past the guards, but her attempts in
behalf of the condemned woman were fruitless.

I knew Preston King very well and his political career interested me
deeply. He was from St. Lawrence County, New York, and in my girlhood I
often heard it asserted that the mantle of Silas Wright had fallen upon
him. I saw much of him in 1849 when I was visiting the Scotts in
Washington, and was parti