She sprang to her feet.  “You will!  Thank you for saying that, though!  I was about to grovel at your feet.  Take me to my coach!  What a fool I was to come here!” She seized her pelisse, and wound it about her as she ran down the hall.  Hamilton followed, insisting that she give him time to awaken a servant.  But she would not heed.  She flung herself into her coach, and called to the driver to gallop his horses, unless he wished to lose his place on the morrow.  Hamilton stood on the porch, listening to the wild flight down the rough hill through the forest But it was unbroken, so long as he could hear anything, and he laughed suddenly and entered the house.

“The high farce of tragedy,” he thought.  “Probably a mosquito will settle on Burr’s nose as he fires, and my life be spared.”

X

The challenge was delivered on Wednesday.  Hamilton refused to withdraw his services from his clients in the midst of the Circuit Court, and July 11th, a fortnight later, was appointed for the meeting.  When Hamilton was not busy with the important interests confided to him by his clients, he arranged his own affairs, and drew up a document for publication, in the event of his death, in which he stated that he had criticised Burr freely for years, but added that he bore him no ill-will, that his opposition had been for public reasons only, that his impressions of Burr were entertained with sincerity, and had been uttered with motives and for purposes which appeared to himself commendable.  He announced his intention to throw away his fire, and gave this reason for yielding to a custom which he had held in avowed abhorrence:  “The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.”

Burr spent several hours of each day in pistol practice, using the cherry trees of Richmond Hill as targets.  Thurlow Weed, in his “Autobiography,” has told of Burr’s testament, written on the night before the duel.  Having neither money nor lands, but an infinitude of debts, to bequeath his daughter, he left her a bundle of compromising letters from women.  The writers moved in circles where virtue was held in esteem, and several were of the world of fashion.  They had, with the instinct of self-defence, which animates women even in that stage where they idealize the man, omitted to sign their names.  Burr supplied the omission in every case and added the present address.  That Hamilton would throw away his fire was a possibility remote from the best effort of Burr’s imagination, and although he knew that no one could fire more quickly than himself, he was not the man to go to the ground unprepared for emergencies:  if his daughter, now Mrs. Alston, would obey his hint and blackmail, she might realize a pretty fortune.  That Theodosia