d was followed in turn by Luther
Martin. The firing was heavy. Boom, boom! went the guns of the
Government, quick and withering came the fire from the defence. If
advantage of position was with the first, the last showed the higher
generalship. The duel was sharp, and it was followed by the spectators
with strained interest. The Chief Justice on the bench and the prisoner
at the bar, attentive though they both were, alone of almost all
concerned seemed to watch the struggle calmly. It drew toward late
afternoon. Luther Martin, still upon the Overt Act, after an ironic
compliment or two to the Government counsel, and a statement that George
Washington, the great and the good, might with a like innocency of
intents have found himself in a like position with Colonel Burr,
withdrew his guns for the night. The prosecution, after a glare of
indignation, announced that on the morrow it would begin examination of
witnesses; the Chief Justice said a few weighty words, and the court was
adjourned.

Out to the air, the grass and the trees, the gleam of the distant James,
and a tremendous and fantastic show of clouds, piled along the horizon
and flushed by the declining sun, streamed the crowd. Excited and
voluble, lavish of opinions that had been pent up for hours, and
drinking in greedily the fresher air, it made no haste to quit the
Capitol portico or the Capitol Square. There were friends and
acquaintances to greet, noted people to speak to, or to hear and see
others speak to, the lawyers to congratulate and the judges to bow
to--and last but not least, there was the prisoner to mark enter, with
the marshal, a plain coach and drive away to the house opposite the
Swan, to which he had been removed from his rooms in the Penitentiary.

The women who had observed the first day of the great trial from the
gallery made, of course, no such tarrying. They left the building and
the square at once, and the men of their families present saw them into
their carriages, or, if the distance home was not great, watched them
walk away in little groups with a servant or two behind them.

At the head of the Capitol steps Jacqueline and Unity found Fairfax Cary
awaiting them, and upon the grass below they were joined by Mr.
Washington Irving. Mrs. Wickham was with them, Mrs. Carrington, Mrs.
Ambler, and Miss Mayo. All the women lived within a short distance of
one another, and all, escorted by the two gentlemen, would walk the
little way across