short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to
poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great
man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters
the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have
in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered
at him, because he lost the fun which they found in shooting or rowing
while he was working away on these grand letters to his grand friend.
They could not understand why Nolan kept by himself while they were
playing high-low jack. Poker was not yet invented. But before long the
young fellow had his revenge. For this time His Excellency, Honorable
Aaron Burr, appeared again under a very different aspect. There were
rumors that he had an army behind him and everybody supposed that he had
an empire before him. At that time the youngsters all envied him. Burr
had not been talking twenty minutes with the commander before he asked
him to send for Lieutenant Nolan. Then after a little talk he asked
Nolan if he could show him something of the great river and the plans
for the new post. He asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff to show
him a canebrake or a cotton-wood tree, as he said,--really to seduce
him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and
soul. From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as A MAN
WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none
of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and
Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on
the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the
great treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant
Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's Sound is
to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage; and, to
while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for