will terminate, God only knows."

But the most

striking thing in this letter is that the Colonel, who knew that the Patriot's master's name was Overstocks, refers to him as "Capt. Soustocks.' The word sous is French for "under;" Captain Overstocks, Captain Understocks-what sort of trick was the Colonel's mind playing him; was it necessary to be mysterious about the Captain's name. .

He hoped that she had been captured, but when rumors of capture began to reach him, he would not believe those. Rumors of piracy, of mutiny, of Carolina wreckers. The Patriot had been captured by the celebrated pirate Dominique You; she had been captured by the infamous "Babe;" Mrs. Alston had been forced to walk the plank with the entire ship's company; something dreadful had happened on Kitty Hawk, near Hatteras, that stronghold of the wreckers; Theodosia had been taken at sea, and carried off. But the Colonel would not believe any of those stories. "No," he kept insisting now. "She is indeed dead. She perished in the miserable little pilot boat. Were she alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father."

He would not believe, but the rumors persisted, until long after his death, in 1850 and thereafter, more substantial versions began to take shape, found in the deathbed confessions of sailors, in the scaffold statements of executed criminals. A schooner-built pilot boat had come ashore in a storm on Kitty Hawk; she had been boarded by the wreckers; some said that they had found the boat abandoned, and a lady's effects scattered about the cabin; there was a portrait of a lady taken ashore, and discovered some

fifty years later, along with some of her clothes, in a cottage on Nag's Head, a cottage inhabited by an old woman who had been the wife of one of the most notorious wreckers in those old days of "the English war;" a portrait which still exists, and is believed by many to be that of Theodosia Alston. Some said that the pilot boat had not been abandoned when the wreckers came aboard.

One is inclined to believe the latter version. A storm off Hatteras-it was so violent that it scattered the British fleet-a schooner-built pilot boat, all the accounts agree on that, driven ashore on Kitty Hawk; the Manns, and the Tilletts, and the rest of the "banker" brotherhood going out to her; and thenthe secret lies hidden, perhaps, in the sands of Kitty Hawk. On the other hand, one may not ignore the statement made, in 1910, by Mr. J. A. Elliott, of Norfolk-himself personally acquainted with the gentleman to whom he refers-that "in the early part of 1813, the dead body of a young woman, with every indication of refinement, drifted upon the shore of Mr. -, at Cape Charles .. on the sea coast of Virginia. She was buried on the farm of the gentleman who found her, and has remained there unidentified and undisturbed the past ninetyseven years. And so the secret lies hidden, perhaps, in that forgotten and nameless grave on Cape Charles; and it is there, after all, that one would be tempted to stand for a moment, in respectful memory of that very excellent lady.

But these things were all unknown to Colonel Burr. He knew only that she was dead; Theodosia the incomparable was no more; the world had become "a

blank to me, and life had then lost its value." From henceforth he was to stand in adversity-like the storm beaten rock on the seal which he used for his letters steadfast and aggressive; no one was to suspect the chasms of despair into which he had been plunged; but the soul within him had perished, foundered with the pilot boat Patriot in the overwhelming waters of affliction.

CHAPTER II

THE PATIENT YEARS

I

"WHAT have we left?" Mr. Alston had asked. Nothing, only some trinkets of Theodosia's, and a letter addressed to her husband; a letter written to him in 1805 already, to be read at her death, in which she had told him that "something whispers me that my end approaches . . . Adieu, friend of my heart. May Heaven prosper you, and may we meet hereafter. Least of all should I murmur . whose days have been numbered by bounties, who have had such a husband, such a child, such a father. Let my father see my son sometimes. Do not be unkind towards him whom I have loved so much, I beseech you. There was nothing left of the old days-even Colonel Burr's papers had all been lost with Theodosia in the Patriot-nothing, except a letter from Mr. Blennerhassett.

He had written before, in 1811, to Mr. Alston, when the latter was running for Governor, and his letter related to various sums of money to which Mr. Blennerhassett still considered himself entitled. "Having

you.

long since despaired," he had observed, "of all indemnity from Mr. Burr for my losses, by the confederacy in which I was associated with you and him, I count upon a partial reimbursement from you.... The heroic offer you made to cooperate with your person and fortune in our common enterprise, gave a color of claim to that succession in empire you boasted you would win by better titles. But I confess, Sir, I attached a more interesting value to the tender you so nobly pledged of your property to forward and support our expedition, together with your special assurances to me of reimbursement for all contingent losses of a pecuniary nature I might individually suffer."

And so, having already paid twelve thousand five hundred dollars of the original fifty thousand advanced by Mr. Blennerhassett, would Mr. Alston now pay fifteen thousand more, or else Mr. Blennerhassett was of the opinion that the electors of South Carolina would be interested to learn of candidate Alston's share in the confederacy, of his intention of joining it at New Orleans with three thousand men, and of the manner in which he had committed "the shabby treason of deserting from your parent by affinity and your sovereign in expectancy," vilified him in a letter to Governor Pinckney, and perjured himself by denying all connection with his projects. Unless the fifteen thousand dollars were forthcoming, Mr. Blennerhassett would publish all his correspondence and interviews with Mr. Alston, and the latter might rest assured that Mr. Blennerhassett had no intention of abandoning "the ore I have extracted . . . from the mines both dark and deep,