and warning Gaines that, in carrying out their illegal requisitions, he would be incurring the most serious liabilities. His manner was firm, his tone imperious, his words keen and forcible; but the resolute young officer told him his mind was made up, the prisoner must accompany him to his quarters, where he would be treated with all the respect due the ex-vicepresident of the United States, so long as he made no attempt to escape. He was then conducted to Fort Stoddart, and thence was conveyed on horseback, in charge of Captain Perkins, to Richmond, Virginia, to be tried by the United States on a charge of high treason, before ChiefJustice Marshall, of the supreme federal

court.

Strange and rapid were Burr's vicissi tudes. From being vice-president of the republic, the idol of a powerful and dominant party, he had become the slayer of America's greatest statesman, and then a bold and disowned adventurer. Defeated and pursued, he was indeed a hopeless fugitive. When he fled from the authorities in the Mississippi territory, he disguised himself in a boatman's dress; his pantaloons were of coarse, copperas-dyed cloth, with a roundabout of inferior drab; his hat, a flapping, wide-brim beaver, had, in times long past, been white, but now gave evidence of having encountered much. rough weather. He finally found himself a prisoner, on his way to be arraigned before a jury of his country, for high crimes and misdemeanors. Yet his fascinating power over men's minds was not yet extinguished. On being placed under guard, to be conveyed to Richmond, it was thought necessary by the directing officer, to take every man composing the squad aside, and obtain the most solemn pledges that, upon the whole route, they would hold no interviews with Burr, nor suffer him to escape alive. His power of fascinating and making strong impressions upon the human mind, and attaching men to him by association, could allow of no familiarity.

A characteristic incident occurred on

the route to Richmond. On reaching the confines of South Carolina, Captain Perkins watched Burr more closely than ever; for, in this state lived the son-in-law of Burr, Colonel Allston, a gentleman of talents, wealth and influence, and afterwards governor of the state. Upon entering the frontiers of Georgia, Perkins endeavored to convey his prisoner in by-roads, to avoid the towns, lest he should be rescued. The plan was attended with difficulty; they were often lost-the march impeded the highway again resumed. Before entering the town of Chester, in South Carolina, the party halted. Two men were placed before Burr, two on either side, and two behind, and, in this manner, they passed near a tavern on the street, where many persons were standing, and music and dancing were heard in the house. Burr conceived it a favorable opportunity for escape, and, suddenly dismounting, exclaimed

"I am Aaron Burr, under military arrest, and claim protection of the civil authorities!"

Perkins leaped from his horse, with several of his men, and ordered him instantly to re-mount.

"I will not!" replied Burr.

was

Not wishing to shoot him, Perkins threw down his pistols, and, being a man of prodigious strength, and the prisoner rather small, seized him around the waist and placed him in his saddle, as though he a child. One of the guards now caught the reins of the bridle, slipped them over the horse's head, and led him rapidly on. The astonished citizens had seen a party enter their village with a prisoner; had heard him appeal to them for protection; had witnessed the feat of Perkins; and the party vanished, before they had time to recover from their confusion-for, when Burr dismounted, the guards cocked their pistols, and the people ran within the piazza to escape from danger. Far off in the outskirts of the village, the party again halted. Burr was intensely agitated; the hitherto ironhearted man was in tears! It was the

On trial, at last, the whole United States waited the result with profoundest interest. It was one of the most memorable state occasions, in the history of human governments. Upon the bench sat the venerated Marshall, calm, dignified, learned. For the prosecution, there appeared District Attorney Hay and the renowned William Wirt. For the defendant, Luther Martin, Edmund Randolph, John Wickham, Benjamin Botts, and, rivaling all the rest, Burr himself. On the jury were such men as John Randolph and Littleton W. Tazewell. Among the spectators were Commodore Truxton, Generals Eaton and Jackson, Washington Irving, Winfield Scott, William B. Giles, John Taylor. Burr was of course the central figure in this master scene. After a trial lasting three or four weeks in midsummer, during which the legal exertions and forensic talent and power displayed on both sides were indeed prodigious, the jury returned a verdict, "that Aaron Burr is not proved to be guilty, under the indictment, by any evidence submitted to us; we, therefore, find him not guilty." The prosecution failed and broke down in its legal proofs, and consequently the indictments against the other conspirators were never pursued.

Blennerhassett found himself stripped of his possessions, because of what he had embarked in this calamitous expedition. He went to England, in quest of an appointment to office, and to Ireland, to look after some reversionary claims, but unsuccessfully in both cases, and, bankrupt and broken-hearted, he removed to the isle of Guernsey, and there died in 1831. Mrs. Blennerhassett died, a few years after, in New York, in the most abject poverty, and was buried by some Irish females.

Burr, without friends or fortune, became an exile in Europe, where he lived in extreme penury, and everywhere shunned as a felon and outlaw. He was peremptorily ordered by the government of England to quit that realm, being regarded as a spy,

under the closest police surveillance. Returning after some years of this kind of life, to his native land, he resumed the profession of the law, but the ban of society rested upon him, and he was, as he himself expressed it, severed from the rest of mankind.

Yet there was one in the wide world who never ceased to pour upon Aaron Burr the richest treasures of woman's adoring love. This was his daughter Theodosia, the beautiful and accomplished wife of Governor Allston, of South Carolina. As has been truly said, by one of the many eulogists of this marvelous woman, her love for her father partook of the purity of a better world,-akin, indeed, to the affection which a celestial spirit might be supposed to entertain for a parent cast down from heaven, for sharing in the sin of the 'Son of the Morning.' Thus it was, that, when in the midst of his deepest obloquy, and when the whole world, as it were, looked upon him, abhorrently, as a depraved monster, the loving and beloved Theodosia could write:

above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear. My vanity would be greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man."

Never had the worthiest and most virtuous of fathers so touching a tribute of love and reverence from a child, as this from the beautiful and gifted Theodosia, to a parent whose very name was regarded by men as the synonym of dishonor and pollution. His love for her, too, was constant and unbounded,-a mutual, fervent, enthusiastic love, between the two, that almost passes belief, and which no description could adequately characterize. Yet it was the destiny of this man to have torn and swept from him the last and only tie that kept him in sympathy with his kind. Returning from his exile in Europe, to the land where he was still regarded as

little else than a fiend in human shape, his heart was buoyed with the expectation of soon clasping to his arms her in whom his earthly all-in-all centered. Alas! he was yet to drain the cup of its nether dregs. Hastening to meet her father on his arrival at New York, Theodosia took passage from Charleston, on the 30th of December, in 1812, in the small pilot schooner Patriot, just from a privateering cruise. But, though a fine sailer, with the best of officers, the vessel was never seen, nor heard from, after leaving port. Whether the vessel took fire and was thus destroyed with all on board, or foundered in the gale which occurred soon after she left Charleston, or was taken by the pirates then infesting the high seas, is unknown to this day. It was a blow which brought indescribable dismay and agony to Burr. Utterly bereft and alone, shunned as a murderer, and despised as a plotter against his country, his wretched existence was prolonged to past four-score years, when he went down in loneliness to the grave, "unwept, unhonored, and unsung." Of his accomplished and affectionate daughter, all tongues and pens have unitedly spoken as "Theodosia the beloved."