Burr read the whole paper through attentively once or twice, and paused thoughtfully over many parts of it.  He sat for some time after, lost in reflection; the paper dropped from his hand, and then followed one of those long, deep seasons of fixed reverie, when the soul thinks by pictures and goes over endless distances in moments.  In him, originally, every moral fatuity and sensibility was as keenly strung as in any member of that remarkable family from which he was descended, and which has, whether in good or ill, borne no common stamp.  Two possible lives flashed before his mind at that moment, rapidly as when a train sweeps by with flashing lamps in the night.  The life of worldly expediency, the life of eternal rectitude,—­the life of seventy years, and that life eternal in which the event of death is no disturbance.  Suddenly he roused himself, picked up the paper, filed and dated it carefully, and laid it by; and in that moment was renewed again that governing purpose which sealed him, with all his beautiful capabilities, as the slave of the fleeting and the temporary, which sent him at last, a shipwrecked man, to a nameless, dishonored grave.

He took his pen and gave to a friend his own views of the events of the day.

“Mr. DEAR,——­We are still in Newport, conjugating the verb s’ennuyer, which I, for one, have put through all the moods and tenses. Pour passer le temps, however, I have la belle Francaise and my sweet little Puritan.  I visited there this morning.  She lives with her mother, a little walk out toward the seaside, in a cottage quite prettily sequestered among blossoming apple-trees, and the great hierarch of modern theology, Dr. H., keeps guard over them.  No chance here for any indiscretions, you see.

“By-the-by, the good Doctor astonished our monde here on Sunday last, by treating us to a solemn onslaught on slavery and the slave-trade.  He had all the chief captains and counsellors to hear him, and smote them hip and thigh, and pursued them even unto Shur.

“He is one of those great, honest fellows, without the smallest notion of the world we live in, who think, in dealing with men, that you must go to work and prove the right or the wrong of a matter; just as if anybody cared for that!  Supposing he is right,—­which appears very probable to me,—­what is he going to do about it?  No moral argument, since the world began, ever prevailed over twenty-five per cent. profit.

“However, he is the spiritual director of la belle Puritaine, and was a resident in my grandfather’s family, so I did the agreeable with him as well as such an uncircumcised Ishmaelite could.  I discoursed theology,—­sat with the most docile air possible while he explained to me all the ins and outs in his system of the universe, past, present, and future,—­heard him dilate calmly on the Millennium, and expound prophetic symbols, marching out before me his whole apocalyptic menagerie of beasts and dragons with heads and horns innumerable, to all which I gave edifying attention, taking occasion now and then to turn a compliment in favor of the ladies,—­never lost, you know.