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Philip Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the “Legion of the West,” as the Western division of our army was then called.  When Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans in 1805, at Fort Massac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as the Devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow, at some dinner-party, I think.  Burr marked him, talked to him, walked with him, took him a day or two’s voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short, fascinated him.  For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan.  He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him.  Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied.  But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver.  The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a politician the time which they devoted to Monongahela, hazard, and high-low-jack.  Bourbon, euchre, and poker were still unknown.  But one day Nolan had his revenge.  This time Burr came down the river, not as an attorney seeking a place for his office, but as a disguised conqueror.  He had defeated I know not how many district-attorneys; he had dined at I know not how many public dinners; he had been heralded in I know not how many Weekly Arguses, and it was rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire before him.  It was a great day—­his arrival—­to poor Nolan.  Burr had not been at the fort an hour before he sent for him.  That evening he asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a cotton-wood tree, as he said,—­really to seduce him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul.  From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as A man without A country.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader.  It is none of our business just now.  Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the great treason-trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget’s Sound is to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage, and, to while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for spectacles, a string of court-martials on the officers there.  One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence enough,—­that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with any one who would follow him had the order been signed, “By command of His Exc.  A. Burr.”  The courts dragged on.  The big flies escaped,—­rightly for all I know.  Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that, when the president of the court asked him at the close, whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy,—­