"What!" said he,

"can neither affection nor civility induce you to devote to
me the small portion of time which I have required? Are
authority and compulsion then the only engines by which you
can be moved? For shame, Theo. Do not give me reason to
think so ill of you."

She reformed. In her twelfth year, her father wrote: "Io triumphe!
there is not a word misspelled either in your journal or letter, which
cannot be said of one you ever wrote before." And again:

"When you want punctuality in your letters, I am sure you
want it in everything; for you will constantly observe that
you have the most leisure when you do the most business.
Negligence of one's duty produces a self-dissatisfaction
which unfits the mind for everything, and _ennui_ and
peevishness are the never-failing consequence."

His letters abound in sound advice. There is scarcely a passage in
them which the most scrupulous and considerate parent could
disapprove. Theodosia heeded well his instructions. She became nearly
all that his heart or his pride desired.

During the later years of her childhood, her mother was grievously
afflicted with a cancer, which caused her death in 1794, before
Theodosia had completed her twelfth year. From that time, such was the
precocity of her character, that she became the mistress of her
father's house and the companion of his leisure hours. Continuing her
studies, however, we find her in her sixteenth year translating French
comedies, reading the Odyssey at the rate of two hundred lines a day,
and about to begin the Iliad. "The happiness of my life," writes her
father, "depends upon your exertions; for what else, for whom else, do
I live?" And, later, when all the world supposed that his whole soul
was absorbed in getting New York ready to vote for Jefferson and Burr,
he told her that the ideas of which _she_ was the subject that passed
daily through his mind would, if committed to writing, fill an octavo
volume.

Who so happy as Theodosia? Who so fortunate? The young ladies of New
York, at the close of the last century, might have been pardoned for
envying the lot of this favorite child of one who then seemed the
favorite child of fortune. Burr had been a Senator of the United
States as soon as he had attained the age demanded by the
Constitution. As a lawyer he was second in ability and success to no
man; in reputation, to none but Hamilton, whose servic