tress of the
heart she adores, can she ask more? Has Heaven more to
grant?"

What a pleasing picture of a happy family circle is this, and how
rarely are the perils of a second marriage so completely overcome! It
was in such a warm and pleasant nest as this that Theodosia Burr
passed the years of her childhood.

Charles Lamb used to say that babies had no right to our regard merely
_as_ babies, but that every child had a character of its own by which
it must stand or fall in the esteem of disinterested observers.
Theodosia was a beautiful and forward child, formed to be the pet and
pride of a household. "Your dear little Theo," wrote her mother in her
third year, "grows the most engaging child you ever saw. It is
impossible to see her with indifference." From her earliest years she
exhibited that singular fondness for her father which afterward became
the ruling passion of her life, and which was to undergo the severest
tests that filial affection has ever known. When she was but three
years of age her mother would write: "Your dear little daughter seeks
you twenty times a day; calls you to your meals, and will not suffer
your chair to be filled by any of the family." And again:

"Your dear little Theodosia cannot hear you spoken of
without an apparent melancholy; insomuch that her nurse is
obliged to exert her invention to divert her, and myself
avoid to mention you in her presence. She was one whole day
indifferent to everything but your name. Her attachment is
not of a common nature."

Here was an inviting opportunity for developing an engaging infant
into that monstrous thing, a spoiled child. She was an only daughter
in a family of which all the members but herself were adults, and the
head of which was among the busiest of men.

But Aaron Burr, amidst all the toils of his profession, and in spite
of the distractions of political strife, made the education of his
daughter the darling object of his existence. Hunters tell us that
pointers and hounds _inherit_ the instinct which renders them such
valuable allies in the pursuit of game; so that the offspring of a
trained dog acquires the arts of the chase with very little
instruction. Burr's father was one of the most zealous and skillful of
schoolmasters, and from him he appears to have derived that pedagogic
cast of character which led him, all his life, to take so much
interest in the training of _proteges_. There was