without
bringing tidings of the vessel, there still remained a forlorn hope
that some of her passengers might have been rescued by an
outward-bound ship, and might return, after a year or two had gone by,
from some distant port. Burr, it is said, acquired a habit, when
walking upon the Battery, of looking wistfully down the harbor at the
arriving ships, as if still cherishing a faint, fond hope that his
Theo was coming to him from the other side of the world. When, years
after, the tale was brought to him that his daughter had been carried
off by pirates and might be still alive, he said: "No, no, no; if my
Theo had survived that storm, she would have found her way to me.
Nothing could have kept my Theo from her father."

It was these sad events, the loss of his daughter and her boy, that
severed Aaron Burr from the human race. Hope died within him. Ambition
died. He yielded to his doom, and walked among men, not melancholy,
but indifferent, reckless, and alone. With his daughter and his
grandson to live and strive for, he might have done something in his
later years to redeem his name and atone for his errors. Bereft of
these, he had not in his moral nature that which enables men who have
gone astray to repent and begin a better life.

Theodosia's death broke her husband's heart. Few letters are so
affecting as the one which he wrote to Burr when, at length, the
certainty of her loss could no longer be resisted.

"My boy--my wife--gone both! This, then, is the end of all
the hopes we had formed. You may well observe that you feel
severed from the human race. She was the last tie that bound
us to the species. What have we left? ... Yet, after all, he
is a poor actor who cannot sustain his little hour upon the
stage, be his part what it may. But the man who has been
deemed worthy of the heart of _Theodosia Burr_, and who has
felt what it was to be blessed with such a woman's, will
never forget his elevation."

He survived his wife four years. Among the papers of Theodosia was
found, after her death, a letter which she had written a few years
before she died, at a time when she supposed her end was near. Upon
the envelope was written,--"My husband. To be delivered after my
death. I wish this to be read _immediately_, and before my burial."
Her husband never saw it, for he never had the courage to look into
the trunk that contained her treasures. But after his death the tru