scene of many trivial vanities and turned with pleasure to the quiet woods and fields of Staten Island, where long ago Matthias Ogden and Aaron Burr, two Jersey lads, had tramped the hillsides and the golden meadows, in the sunlit days of youth. . . . 3 The Winants were Dutch folk, placidly oblivious of popular opinion and current prejudice; when even Judge Edwards, no doubt for the best of reasons, could not take Colonel Burr into his home at Dongan Manor, they received him without commotion or dismay, and surrounded him with thoughtful kindness, shielding him from the importunities of strangers. A few months passed. Doctor Clark was in attendance; the Reverend P. J. Van Pelt came and went. The Scriptures, the Colonel assured him, were "the most perfect system of truth the world has ever seen." But the Colonel was not in need of religious consolation-although he had not always entirely neglected the observances of the Church; at all events, there exists an undated letter to him from Richard Platt, telling him that "I have not been successful as yet to find a pew in St. John's Church; but you can always find a seat in my pew, No. 107, and oftentimes your children in the afternoon." If, as is natural to suppose, the church in question was St. John's on St. John's Park, one wonders what children are referred to, as St. John's was not in fashionable use until some time after his return from Europe. Perhaps Mr. Platt had the Eden young ladies in mind. But at Port Richmond, certainly, though ever patiently courteous with Mr. Van Pelt, Colonel Burr was not interested; and at the last, when the minister asked him, "in this solemn hour of your apparent dissolution, believing as you do in the sacred Scriptures [and] your accountability to God," whether he had "good hope, through grace, that all of your sins will be pardoned," the Colonel replied that "on that subject I am coy." July, August, September. From his window on the second floor he might have looked across the Jersey marshes as far as Elizabethtown, nearly as far as Newark, where he had been born; but they had him in bed now most of the time, frail, and helpless, and almost childish. He was always better in the evenings, and people came to see him-the Judge, the Swartwouts, Mrs. Newton-and the two Winant girls, celebrated belles in their day, were always within call, so that until the very end he enjoyed the ministration of women. And on September 14, 1836, he whispered the word "Madame," and died. 4 The good Mrs. Newton came one last time again, while Olando Buel was making his necessary preparations; on the morning of September 16, a service was conducted by Mr. Van Pelt in the inn parlor, and attended by Matthew Davis, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Swartwouts, and one or two others besides the Edwards family; and the body was immediately taken by steamer to Amboy, thence by rail to Hightstown, and from there conveyed to Princeton. He had asked to be buried in Princeton, near his parents. They arrived at one o'clock in the afternoon, and deposited him in the College chapel. "At half past three," the Princeton Whig recorded, "the Students of the College and Seminary, and a number of the citizens of Princeton, assembled in the [chapel]. The exercises commenced by reading the 90th Psalm, which was followed by prayer, by the Rev. Dr. Van Pelt.. An impressive discourse was pronounced by the Rev. Dr. Carnahan"-the President of Princeton. "The Rev. Dr. B. H. Rice made the concluding prayer, after which the procession was formed. The Military, the Hearse, the Pall Bearers". Generals Robert Swartwout and Bogardus, Colonels Romeyn, Scott and Samuel Swartwout, Major Popham, Mr. Western and Mr. Corp-"the Clergy, Mourners, Professors, Students of the Colleges "including the full roster of the Cliosophic Society wearing the bands of crape decreed "as a feeble testimony of our respect . for the space of thirty days"-"and Citizens. [The procession] proceeded to the Church yard, under the escort of one of our handsome volunteer corps, the Mercer Guards, who paid the customary honours of a military funeral in a manner highly creditable to them." The grave was placed at the feet of his father and grandfather. It was a meet and decent burial, the last official honors "to the remains of this celebrated man," whose career had been "one of deep and thrilling interest and adventure. At one time within one vote of being Chief Magistrate of the United States; at another dragged as a felon to the bar of a legal tribunal and now again in his native town, and within the walls of his Alma Mater; he is here, but the spirit has departed from him. "They had buried the Lieutenant Colonel, the ex-Vice President, with military honorsbut no monument was erected over the resting place of Aaron Burr. It might, they feared in those hostile days, have drawn attention to the grave, and invited insult. Twenty years later, only, was a stone provided by Alfred Edwards, cut in Brown's marble yard at New York. On it was inscribed AARON BURR Born February 6th, 1756. Died September 14th, 1836. A Colonel in the Army of the Revolution. Aaron Burr-there was something in the name itself that compelled attention, aside from the ingratiating charm, the perfect manners, the tremendous presence of that little man who caused so many bigger men to bow down to him, and the marvelous eyes. Nature, heredity, the little accidents of voice, and face, and gesture, had been so generous to him-in compensation for his stature had so conspired to |