"The only person on the Democratic side who communicated with Mr. Conkling was Senator William H. Barnum, of Connecticut, chairman of the Democratic National Executive Committee. Mr. Barnum talked to others, as he deemed it discreet, but we all thought it unwise that any one on our side should approach any one on the opposite side of politics, except Senator Barnum. During the afternoon of the day before the final vote was given in the Senate on the Louisiana case, Senator Stevenson, whose daughter was the wife of one of my partners, and who was until he died my very dear and honored friend, communicated to me, as having come to him from Senator Barnum, all the details of what I may call, for brevity's sake, 'this plot' to arrest the high-handed dealings of the Republicans, and I went to bed that night in full confidence that Mr. Tilden would be placed on a legal basis for inauguration to the Presidency in the morning. Eight (or nine) Senators had agreed with each other to cast their votes in the Senate so as to reverse the judgment of the electoral tribunal in the Louisiana case.
"When I came down to breakfast in the morning, William R. Pelton, Gov. Tilden's nephew, told me that 'the fat is all in the fire'; that at two o'clock in the morning _one of the Senators_, whose name, for reasons personal to myself and to him, I do not feel at liberty to use, had come to Senator Conkling and told him that he did not dare to go any further with the enterprise; that his political and perhaps his personal future would be ruined if he did not vote for Hayes. Conkling thereupon made up his mind that the game was lost, and took the earliest train to Baltimore, where he would, as Pelton said, spend the day, and where he did, as I afterwards learned, spend the day. Although I possessed Mr. Conkling's confidence and regard (I have a letter from him somewhere, couched in more earnest terms of gratitude than I ever received from any other human being), I never spoke with him on this subject. My information was derived entirely from Senator Stevenson and William T. Pelton, with the latter of whom I was, as I have already explained I was with the former, on terms of confidence.
"During this period I never heard Mrs. Sprague's name mentioned. I do not know whether she was in Washington or not. I was her father's friend, as you probably know, and I was her friend, and in the matter of the divorce from Gov. Sprague I was (with Winchester Britton, of Brooklyn) her counsel, and procured her divorce. I have had many consultations with both Pelton and his uncle upon various political and personal matters, but never heard this matter alluded to by either of them, or by Mrs. Sprague, and I do not believe that the story has any foundation in truth whatever. She knew perfectly well, for many years before she died, that I was a friend of Gov. Tilden's; that my wife and I both had enjoyed his personal hospitality, and knowing, as she did, my feelings towards her father, and having been her legal agent and representative, as I was, in association with the late Richard T. Merrick, in an attempt, which never came to daylight, to kill Judge Warden's grotesque biography of S. P. Chase, this is the first time I ever heard any interference of hers in the matter of the electoral tribunal even referred to. Mrs. Sprague has left children and friends who mourn over her sad fate and grieve at her death, and, among others,