treasonable design on the part of his father-in-law, and repelled with honest warmth the charge of his own complicity with a design so manifestly absurd and hopeless as that of a dismemberment of the Union.  Theodosia, stunned with the unexpected blow, returned with her husband to South Carolina, ignorant of her father’s fate.  He was carried through that State on his way to the North, and there it was that he made his well-known attempt to appeal to the civil authorities and get deliverance from the guard of soldiers.  From Richmond he wrote her a hasty note, informing her of his arrest.  She and her husband joined him soon, and remained with him during his trial.

At Richmond, during the six months of the trial, Burr tasted the last of the sweets of popularity.  The party opposed to Mr. Jefferson made his cause their own, and gathered round the fallen leader with ostentatious sympathy and aid.  Ladies sent him bouquets, wine, and dainties for his table, and bestowed upon his daughter the most affectionate and flattering attentions.  Old friends from New York and new friends from the West were there to cheer and help the prisoner.  Andrew Jackson was conspicuously his friend and defender, declaiming in the streets upon the tyranny of the Administration and the perfidy of Wilkinson, Burr’s chief accuser.  Washington Irving, then in the dawn of his great renown, who had given the first efforts of his youthful pen to Burr’s newspaper, was present at the trial, full of sympathy for a man whom he believed to be the victim of treachery and political animosity.  Doubtless he was not wanting in compassionate homage to the young matron from South Carolina.  Mr. Irving was then a lawyer, and had been retained as one of Burr’s counsel; not to render service in the court-room, but in the expectation that his pen would be employed in staying the torrent of public opinion that was setting against his client.  Whether or not he wrote in his behalf does not appear.  But his private letters, written at Richmond during the trial, show plainly enough that, if his head was puzzled by the confused and contradictory evidence, his heart and his imagination were on the side of the prisoner.

Theodosia’s presence at Richmond was of more value to her father than the ablest of his counsel.  Every one appears to have loved, admired, and sympathized with her.  “You can’t think,” wrote Mrs. Blennerhassett, “with what joy and pride I read what Colonel Burr says of his daughter.  I never could love one of my own sex as I do her.”  Blennerhassett himself was not less her friend.  Luther Martin, Burr’s chief counsel, almost worshipped her.  “I find,” wrote Blennerhassett,