The mother’s heart was almost broken.

“There is no more joy for me,” she wrote.

“The world is a blank.  I have lost my boy.  My child is gone forever.  May Heaven, by other blessings, make you some amends for the noble grandson you have lost!  Alas! my dear father, I do live, but how does it happen?  Of what am I formed that I live, and why?  Of what service can I be in this world, either to you or any one else, with a body reduced to premature old age, and a mind enfeebled and bewildered?  Yet, since it is my lot to live, I will endeavor to fulfil my part, and exert myself to my utmost, though this life must henceforth be to me a bed of thorns.  Whichever way I turn, the same anguish still assails me.  You talk of consolation.  Ah! you know not what you have lost.  I think Omnipotence could give me no equivalent for my boy; no, none,—­none.”

She could not be comforted.  Her health gave way.  Her husband thought that if anything could restore her to tranquillity and health it would be the society of her father; and so, at the beginning of winter, it was resolved that she should attempt the dangerous voyage.  Her father sent a medical friend from New York to attend her.

“Mr. Alston,” wrote this gentleman,

“seemed rather hurt that you should conceive it necessary to send a person here, as he or one of his brothers would attend Mrs. Alston to New York.  I told him you had some opinion of my medical talents; that you had learned your daughter was in a low state of health, and required unusual attention, and medical attention on her voyage; that I had torn myself from my family to perform this service for my friend.”

And again, a few days after:—­

“I have engaged a passage to New York for your daughter in a pilot-boat that has been out privateering, but has come in here, and is refitting merely to get to New York.  My only fears are that Governor Alston may think the mode of conveyance too undignified, and object to it; but Mrs. Alston is fully bent on going.  You must not be surprised, to see her very low, feeble, and emaciated.  Her complaint is an almost incessant nervous fever.”

The rest is known.  The vessel sailed.  Off Cape Hatteras, during a gale that swept the coast from Maine to Georgia, the pilot-boat went down, and not one escaped to tell the tale.  The vessel was never heard of more.  So perished this noble, gifted, ill-starred lady.

The agonizing scenes that followed may be imagined.  Father and husband were kept long in suspense.  Even when many weeks had elapsed without bringing tidings of the vessel, there still remained a forlorn hope that some of her passengers might have been rescued by an outward-bound ship, and might return, after a year or two had gone by, from some distant port.  Burr, it is said, acquired a habit, when walking upon the Battery, of looking wistfully down the harbor at the arriving ships, as if still cherishing a faint, fond hope that his Theo was coming to him from the other side of the world.  When, years after, the tale was brought to him that his daughter had been carried off by pirates and might be still alive, he said:  “No, no, no; if my Theo had survived that storm, she would have found her way to me.  Nothing could have kept my Theo from her father.”