so long and arduous, and reminded him of the public offices he could have for the asking.  But Hamilton was acquainted with his capacity for annihilating work, and at this time he was not conscious of any immediate ambition but of keeping his wife in a proper style and of founding a fortune for the education of his children.  His military ambition had been so possessing that the sudden and brilliant finish at York Town of his power to gratify it had dwarfed for a while any other he may have cherished.

He took a little house in the long street on the river front, and invited Troup to live with him.  They studied together.  He had been the gayest of companions, the most courted of favourites, since his return from the wars.  For four months even his wife and Troup had, save on Sundays, few words with him on unlegal matters.  His brain excluded every memory, every interest.  For the first time he omitted to write regularly to Mrs. Mitchell, Hugh Knox, and Peter Lytton.  All day and half the night he walked up and down his library, or his father-in-law’s, reading, memorizing, muttering aloud.  His friends vowed that he marched the length and width of the Confederacy.  He never gave a more striking exhibition of his control over the powers of his intellect than this.  The result was that at the end of four months he obtained a license to practise as an attorney, and published a “Manual on the Practice of Law,” which, Troup tells us, “served as an instructive grammar to future students, and became the groundwork of subsequent enlarged practical treatises.”  If it be protested that these feats were impossible, I can only reply that they are historic facts.

It was during these months of study that Aaron Burr came to Albany.

This young man, also, was not unknown to fame; and the period of the Revolution is the one on which Burr’s biographers should dilate, for it was the only one through which he passed in a manner entirely to his credit.  He was now in Albany, striving for admittance to the bar, but handicapped by the fact that he had studied only two years, instead of the full three demanded by law.

While Burr did not belong to the aristocracy of the country, his family not ranking by any means with the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Jays, Morrises, Roosevelts, and others of that small and haughty band, still he came of excellent and respectable stock.  His father had been the Rev. Aaron Burr, President of Princeton College, and his mother the daughter of the famous Jonathan Edwards.  He was quick-witted and brilliant; and there is no adjective which qualifies his ambition.  He was a year older than Hamilton, about an inch taller, and very dark.  His features were well cut, his eyes black, glittering, and cold; his bearing dignified but unimposing, for he bent his shoulders and walked heavily.  His face was not frank, even in youth, and grew noticeably craftier.  He and Hamilton were the greatest fops