Lewis was yet in Williamsburgh.  Had he been present in this hail, watching events with his fellow lawyers, fellow politicians, fellow countrymen, who knew nothing of one snowy night a year ago last February, his wife, for both their sakes, would have remained away.  As it was, she had been persuaded.  Unity would not for much have missed the spectacle, friends had been pressing, and at last her own painful interest prevailed.  She was here now, and she sat as in a waking dream, her hands idle, her eyes, wide and dark, steadily fixed upon the scene below.  She saw, leaning against a window, Ludwell Cary, and, the centre of a cluster of men in hunting-shirts, Adam Gaudylock.

The Capitol clock struck twelve.  As the last stroke died upon the feverish air, the Chief Justice entered the Hall and took the Speaker’s chair.  Beside him was Cyrus Griffin, the District Judge.  Hay, the District Attorney, with his associates William Wirt and Alexander McRae, now appeared, and immediately afterward the imposing array of the prisoner’s counsel, a phalanx which included no less than four sometime Attorneys-General and two subalterns of note.  These took the seats reserved for them; the marshal and his deputies pressed the people back, and the jury entered and filled the jury box.  Below and near them sat a medley of witnesses—­important folk, and folk whom only this trial made important.

A loud murmur was now heard from without; the marshal’s men, red and perspiring, cleared a thread-like path, and the prisoner, accompanied by his son-in-law, entered the Hall.  He was dressed in black, with carefully powdered hair.  Quiet, cool, smiling, and collected, he was brought to the bar, when, having taken his place, bowed to the judges, and greeted his counsel, he turned slightly and surveyed with his composed face and his extremely keen black eyes the throng that with intentness looked on him in turn.  It was by no means their first encounter of eyes.  The preliminaries of that famous trial had been many and prolonged.  From the prisoner’s arrival in April under military escort to the present moment, through the first arraignment at that bar, the assembling of the Grand Jury, the tedious waiting for Wilkinson’s long-deferred arrival from New Orleans, the matter of the subpoena to the President with which the country rang, the adjournment from June to August, the victory gained by the defence in the exclusion of Wilkinson’s evidence, and the clamour of the two camps into which the city was divided,—­through all this had been manifest the prisoner’s deliberate purpose and attempt to make every fibre of a personality ingratiating beyond that of most, tell in its own behalf.  He had able advocates, but none more able than Aaron Burr.  His day and time was, on the whole, a time astonishingly fluid and naive, and he impressed it.