age of thirty he had permitted himself to be drawn from a lucrative and always increasing professional business to the fascinating but most costly pursuit of political honors.  And now; when he stood at a distance of only one step from the highest place, he was pursued by a clamorous host of creditors, and compelled to resort to a hundred expedients to maintain the expensive establishments supposed to be necessary to a Vice-President’s dignity.  His political position was as hollow as his social eminence.  Mr. Jefferson was firmly resolved that Aaron Burr should not be his successor; and the great families of New York, whom Burr had united to win the victory over Federalism, were now united to bar the further advancement of a man whom they chose to regard as an interloper and a parvenu.  If Burr’s private life had been stainless, if his fortune had been secure, if he had been in his heart a Republican and a Democrat, if he had been a man earnest in the people’s cause, if even his talents had been as superior as they were supposed to be, such a combination of powerful families and political influence might have retarded, but could not have prevented, his advancement; for he was still in the prime of his prime, and the people naturally side with a man who is the architect of his own fortunes.

On the 1st of July, 1804, Burr sat in the library of Richmond Hill writing to Theodosia.  The day was unseasonably cold, and a fire blazed upon the hearth.  The lord of the mansion was chilly and serious.  An hour before he had taken the step which made the duel with Hamilton inevitable, though eleven days were to elapse before the actual encounter.  He was tempted to prepare the mind of his child for the event, but he forebore.  Probably his mind had been wandering into the past, and recalling his boyhood; for he quoted a line of poetry which he had been wont to use in those early days.  “Some very wise man has said,” he wrote,

     “‘Oh, fools, who think it solitude to be alone!’

“This is but poetry.  Let us, therefore, drop the subject, lest it lead to another, on which I have imposed silence on myself.”  Then he proceeds, in his usual gay and agreeable manner, again urging her to go on in the pursuit of knowledge.  His last thoughts before going to the field were with her and for her.  His last request to her husband was that he should do all that in him lay to encourage her to improve her mind.

The bloody deed was done.  The next news Theodosia received from her father was that he was a fugitive from the sudden abhorrence of his fellow-citizens; that an indictment for murder was hanging over his head; that his career in New York was, in all probability, over forever; and that he was destined to be for a time a wanderer on the earth.  Her happy days were at an end.  She never blamed her father for this, or for any act of his; on the contrary, she accepted without questioning his own version of the facts, and his own view of the morality of what he had done.