The crowd burst into an electrified roar.  “Three cheers for General Hamilton!” cried the carter, promptly, and they responded as one man.  Then they lifted him from his horse and bore him on their shoulders to the poll.  He deposited his ballot, and after addressing them to the sound of incessant cheering, was permitted to ride away.  The incident both amused and disgusted him, but he needed no further illustrations of the instability of the common mind.

The Republicans won.  On the night of the 2d it was known that the Federalists had lost the city by a Republican majority of four hundred and ninety votes.

A few weeks before, when uncertainties were thickest, Hamilton had written to William Smith, who was departing for Constantinople:  “...  You see I am in a humour to laugh.  What can we do better in this best of all possible worlds? Should you ever be shut up in the seven towers, or get the plague, if you are a true philosopher you will consider this only as a laughing matter.”

He laughed—­though not with the gaiety of his youth—­as he walked home to-night through the drunken yelling crowds of William Street, more than one fist thrust in his face.  His son Philip was with him, and his cousin, Robert Hamilton of Grange, who had come over two years before to enlist under the command of the American relative of whom his family were vastly proud.  A berth had been found for him in the navy, as better suited to his talents, and he spent his leisure at 26 Broadway.  Both the younger men looked crestfallen and anxious.  Philip, who resembled his father so closely that Morris called him “his heir indubitate,” looked, at the moment, the older of the two.  Ill health had routed the robust appearance of Hamilton’s early maturity, and his slender form, which had lost none of its activity or command, his thin face, mobile, piercing, fiery, as ever, made him appear many years younger than his age.

“Why do you laugh, sir?” asked Philip, as they turned into Wall Street, “I feel as if the end of the world had come.”

“That is the time to laugh, my dear boy.  When you see the world you have educated scampering off through space, the retreat led by the greatest rascal in the country, your humour, if you have any, is bound to respond.  Moreover, there is always something humorous in one’s downfall, and a certain relief.  The worst is over.”

“But, Cousin Alexander,” said Robert Hamilton, “surely this is not ultimate defeat for you?  You will not give up the fight after the first engagement—­you!”

“Oh, no! not I!” cried Hamilton.  “I shall fight on until I have made Thomas Jefferson President of the United States.  Should I not laugh?  Was any man ever in so ironical a situation before?  I shall move heaven and America to put Pinckney in the chair, and I shall fail; and to save the United States from Burr I shall turn over the country I have made to my bitterest enemy.”