The letter runs: 

“...  This will be handed to you by Colonel Brant, the celebrated Indian Chief....  He is a man of education....  Receive him with respect and hospitality.  He is not one of those Indians who drink rum, but is quite a gentleman; not one who will make you fine bows, but one who understands and practises what belongs to propriety and good-breeding.  He has daughters—­if you could think of some little present to send to one of them (a pair of earrings for example) it would please him....”

Even the prodigiously resourceful Theo was a bit taken aback by this sudden proposition.  In the highly cosmopolitan circle that she was used to entertaining, she so far had encountered no savages, and, in common with most young people, she thought of “Brant” as a fierce barbarian who,—­her father’s letter notwithstanding,—­probably carried a tomahawk and would dance a war dance in the stately hallway of Richmond Hill.

In her letter to her father, written after she had met Brant and made him welcome, she admitted that she had been paramountly worried about what she ought to give him to eat.  She declared that her mind was filled with wild ideas of (and she quotes): 

    "’The Cannibals that each other eat,
    The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
    Do grow beneath their shoulders!’"

She had, she confesses, a vague notion that all savages ate human beings, and—­though this obviously was intended as a touch of grisly humour,—­had half a notion to procure a human head and have it served up in state after the mediaeval fashion of serving boars’ heads in Old England!

However, she presented him with a most up-to-date and epicurean banquet, and had the wit and good taste to include in her dinner party such representative men as Bishop Moore, Dr. Bard and her father’s good friend Dr. Hosack, the surgeon.

When the party was over she wrote Burr quite enthusiastically about the Indian Chief, and declared him to have been “a most Christian and civilised guest in his manners!”

There were no ladies at Theo’s dinner party.  She lived so much among men, and so early learned to take her place as hostess and woman that I imagine she would have had small patience with the patronage and counsel of older members of her sex.  That she was extravagantly popular with men old and young is proved in many ways.  Wherever she went she was a belle.  Whether the male beings she met chanced to be young and stupid or old and wise, there was something for them to admire in Theo, for she was both beautiful and witty, and she had something of her father’s “confidence of manner” which won adherents right and left.

Mayor Livingston took her on board a frigate in the harbour one day, and warned her to leave her usual retainers behind.

“Now, Theodosia,” he admonished her with affectionate raillery, “you must bring none of your sparks on board!  They have a magazine there, and we should all be blown up!”