From an engraving of the pantograph drawing by St. Memin in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution. There is also in existence a childhood portrait by Vanderlyn, privately owned.

and then set out for Albany where the want of money is our only grievance. You know how far this affects

me.

"Our house is roomy but convenient. I have not yet been able to procure a good servant, though Burr has taken all imaginable pains, but we have one in prospect, if some evil does not interfere. We are impatient to have you with us. We count the weeks. You must not, you will not, disappoint us. The air of Albany is healthy. But why enumerate inducements? My friends know the pleasure they will give us that their presence will crown the felicity of a brother and sister who love them with tenderness and affection. Your tender concern for us is testimony of your regard, and summons a tear of gratitude and love. Yes, my sister, I realize my joy fully."

There were friends, and gaiety, and plenty of punch, no doubt; and many letters of felicitation

from Judge Hobart, from Governor Clinton, from William Livingston who said that he had "but a Moment's Time to Congratulate you on the late happy Circumstance of your Marriage with the Amiable Mrs. Prevost. Confident that the Object of your Choice would ever meet Universal Esteem, I have waited impatiently to know on whom it would be placed. The Secret at length is revealed, and the Tongue of Malice dare not I think contaminate it. May Love be the Time Piece in your Mansion, and Happiness its Minute Hand." The letter was written a week after the wedding, and was addressed to Paramus.

And so the long courtship was over, and Colonel

Burr was married at last-to a woman ten years his senior, a widow with five children, an invalid, possessed of little material fortune, and endowed with few personal charms. She was, in fact, slightly disfigured facially, as the result of a burn. One might wonder, indeed, what it was in her that attracted this popular young man of twenty-six whose effect upon the fair sex-and upon the fairest of its fair-had already been so gratifyingly profound; until one remembers that Theodosia Bartow Burr was perhaps one of the most cultivated women of her time; a student of literature and philosophy; a lover of pictures and books; a creature of exquisite manners and graces adorning an exceptionally luminous intellect-in his own words, a woman whom he loved because she had the truest heart, the ripest intellect, and the most winning and graceful manners of any woman he had ever met, to whose influence he ascribed any measure of perfection to which his own might have attained. Woven through the fabric of their hearts' intercourse, theirs was to be a rare companionship of the mind; and it was, surely, a striking appreciation of his own culture and intellectuality that she, so richly furnished with those qualities, should still have derived an inspiring pleasure from his.

CHAPTER II

SOME LETTERS

I

IN 1783, there was peace with England, the British were to evacuate New York, and Burr decided to move from Albany to the larger city. In April, already, one of his Bartow relations was writing him that "I have procured you a good house in Maiden Lane, at the rate of two hundred pounds a year. The rent to commence when the troops leave the city. Doctor Brown can inform you more particulars about it, as he went with me to view it." But the Burrs did not take this house at the time, as one learns from an unpublished letter of Burr's to one of his uncles, written in November, in which he asked him for money-the Colonel was always in shallow financial waters and told him of his proposed removal.

"I have finally determined to leave this place," he wrote. "This resolution has cost me much anxiety -but as I have adopted it after much deliberation, and from the purest motives, I trust I shall have no cause to repent it. I need not tell you that

.

I shall want more money than I fear I shall be able

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