ume their former occupations. Many new enterprises waited only
for the departure of the troops to be entered upon. A large number of
young men were looking to New York as the scene of their future
career. Albany, which had served as the temporary capital of the
State, was full of lawyers, law-students, retired soldiers, merchants,
and mechanics, who were prepared to remove to New York as soon as
Rivington's Gazette should inform them that the British had really
left, and General Washington taken possession. As in these days
certain promises to pay are to be fulfilled six months after the
United States shall have acknowledged the independence of a certain
Confederacy, so at that time it was a custom for leases and other
compacts to be dated from "the day on which the British troops shall
leave New York." Among the young men in Albany who were intending to
repair to the city were two retired officers of distinction, Alexander
Hamilton, a student at law, and Aaron Burr, then in the second year of
his practice at the bar. James Kent and Edward Livingston were also
students of law in Albany at that time. The old Tory lawyers being all
exiled or silenced, there was a promising field in New York for young
advocates of talent, and these two young gentlemen had both contracted
marriages which necessitated speedy professional gains. Hamilton had
won the daughter of General Schuyler. Burr was married to the widow of
a British officer, whose fortune was a few hundred pounds and two fine
strapping boys fourteen and sixteen years of age.

And Burr was himself a father. Theodosia, "his only child," was born
at Albany in the spring of 1783. When the family removed to New York
in the following winter, and took up their abode in Maiden Lane,--"the
rent to commence when the troops leave the city,"--she was an engaging
infant of seven or eight months. We may infer something of the
circumstances and prospects of her father, when we know that he had
ventured upon a house of which the rent was two hundred pounds a year.
We find him removing, a year or two after, to a mansion at the corner
of Cedar and Nassau streets, the garden and grapery of which were
among the finest in the thickly settled portion of the city. Fifty
years after, he had still an office within a very few yards of the
same spot, though all trace of the garden of Theodosia's childhood had
long ago disappeared. She was a child of affluence. Not till she had
left her father's ho