ought. "Probably a mosquito will
settle on Burr's nose as he fires, and my life be spared."

X

The challenge was delivered on Wednesday. Hamilton refused to withdraw
his services from his clients in the midst of the Circuit Court, and
July 11th, a fortnight later, was appointed for the meeting. When
Hamilton was not busy with the important interests confided to him by
his clients, he arranged his own affairs, and drew up a document for
publication, in the event of his death, in which he stated that he had
criticised Burr freely for years, but added that he bore him no
ill-will, that his opposition had been for public reasons only, that his
impressions of Burr were entertained with sincerity, and had been
uttered with motives and for purposes which appeared to himself
commendable. He announced his intention to throw away his fire, and
gave this reason for yielding to a custom which he had held in avowed
abhorrence: "The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting
mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which
seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity
with public prejudice in this particular."

Burr spent several hours of each day in pistol practice, using the
cherry trees of Richmond Hill as targets. Thurlow Weed, in his
"Autobiography," has told of Burr's testament, written on the night
before the duel. Having neither money nor lands, but an infinitude of
debts, to bequeath his daughter, he left her a bundle of compromising
letters from women. The writers moved in circles where virtue was held
in esteem, and several were of the world of fashion. They had, with the
instinct of self-defence, which animates women even in that stage where
they idealize the man, omitted to sign their names. Burr supplied the
omission in every case and added the present address. That Hamilton
would throw away his fire was a possibility remote from the best effort
of Burr's imagination, and although he knew that no one could fire more
quickly than himself, he was not the man to go to the ground unprepared
for emergencies: if his daughter, now Mrs. Alston, would obey his hint
and blackmail, she might realize a pretty fortune. That Theodosia Burr,
even with the incentive of poverty, would have sunk to such ignominy, no
one who knows the open history of her short life will believe; but the
father, whose idol she was, insulted her and stained her memory, too
depraved and warped t