n the husband and wife was the result of this colloquy.
Then came remonstrances. Then estrangement. Burr got into the habit of
remaining at his office in the city. Then partial reconciliation. Full
of schemes and speculations to the last, without retaining any of his
former ability to operate successfully, he lost more money, and more,
and more. The patience of the lady was exhausted. She filed a
complaint accusing him of infidelity, and praying that he might have
no more control or authority over her affairs. The accusation is now
known to have been groundless; nor, indeed, at the time was it
seriously believed. It was used merely as the most convenient legal
mode of depriving him of control over her property. At first he
answered the complaint vigorously, but afterward he allowed it to go
by default, and proceedings were carried no further. A few short weeks
of happiness, followed by a few months of alternate estrangement and
reconciliation, and this union, that began not inauspiciously, was, in
effect, tho never in law, dissolved. What is strangest of all is that
the lady, tho she never saw her husband during the last two years of
his life, cherished no ill-will toward him, and shed tears at his
death. To this hour Madame Jumel thinks and speaks of him with
kindness, attributing what was wrong or unwise in his conduct to the
infirmities of age.

Men of seventy-eight have been married before and since. But,
probably, never has there been another instance of a man of that age
winning a lady of fortune and distinction, grieving another by his
marriage, and exciting suspicions of incontinence against himself by
his attentions to a third!

FRANCIS PARKMAN

Born in 1823, died in 1893; graduated from Harvard in 1844;
studied law, but abandoned it for literature; his eyesight
so defective he was nearly blind; professor at Harvard in
1871-72; published his "Conspiracy of Pontiac" in 1851,
"Pioneers of France in the New World" in 1865, "Jesuits in
North America" in 1867, "La Salle and the Discovery of the
Great West" in 1869, "The Old Regime in Canada" in 1874,
"Count Frontenac" in 1877, "Montcalm and Wolfe" in 1884, "A
Half-Century of Conflict" in 1892.

I

CHAMPLAIN'S BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS[47]

(1609)

It was ten o'clock in the evening when, near a projecting point of
land, which was probably Ticonderoga, they descried dark objects in
motion on the lake