carried
a tomahawk and would dance a war dance in the stately hallway of
Richmond Hill.

In her letter to her father, written after she had met Brant and made
him welcome, she admitted that she had been paramountly worried about
what she ought to give him to eat. She declared that her mind was
filled with wild ideas of (and she quotes):

_"'The Cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders!'"_

She had, she confesses, a vague notion that all savages ate human
beings, and--though this obviously was intended as a touch of grisly
humour,--had half a notion to procure a human head and have it served
up in state after the mediaeval fashion of serving boars' heads in Old
England!

However, she presented him with a most up-to-date and epicurean
banquet, and had the wit and good taste to include in her dinner party
such representative men as Bishop Moore, Dr. Bard and her father's
good friend Dr. Hosack, the surgeon.

When the party was over she wrote Burr quite enthusiastically about
the Indian Chief, and declared him to have been "a most Christian and
civilised guest in his manners!"

There were no ladies at Theo's dinner party. She lived so much among
men, and so early learned to take her place as hostess and woman that
I imagine she would have had small patience with the patronage and
counsel of older members of her sex. That she was extravagantly
popular with men old and young is proved in many ways. Wherever she
went she was a belle. Whether the male beings she met chanced to be
young and stupid or old and wise, there was something for them to
admire in Theo, for she was both beautiful and witty, and she had
something of her father's "confidence of manner" which won adherents
right and left.

Mayor Livingston took her on board a frigate in the harbour one day,
and warned her to leave her usual retainers behind.

"Now, Theodosia," he admonished her with affectionate raillery, "you
must bring none of your _sparks_ on board! They have a magazine there,
and we should all be blown up!"

In 1801, when she was eighteen years old, the lovely Theo married
Joseph Alston, an immensely rich rice planter from South Carolina,
owner of more than a thousand slaves, and at one time governor of his
state. Though she went to the South to live, she never could bear to
sever entirely her relations with Richmond Hill. It is a curious fact
that everyone who ever l