use did a shadow of misfortune darken its portals.
Abundance and elegance surrounded her from her infancy, and whatever
advantages in education and training wealth can produce for a child
she had in profusion. At the same time her father's vigilant stoicism
guarded her from the evils attendant upon a too easy acquisition of
things pleasant and desirable.

She was born into a happy home. Even if we had not the means of
knowing something of the character of her mother, we might still infer
that she must have possessed qualities singularly attractive to induce
a man in the position of Burr to undertake the charge of a family at
the outset of his career. She was neither handsome nor young, nor had
she even the advantage of good health. A scar disfigured her face.
Burr,--the brilliant and celebrated Burr,--heir of an honored name,
had linked his rising fortunes with an invalid and her boys. The event
most abundantly justified his choice, for in all the fair island of
Manhattan there was not a happier family than his, nor one in which
happiness was more securely founded in the diligent discharge of duty.
The twelve years of his married life were his brightest and best; and
among the last words he ever spoke were a pointed declaration that his
wife was the best woman and the finest lady he had ever known. It was
her cultivated mind that drew him to her. "It was a knowledge of your
mind," he once wrote her,

"which first inspired me with a respect for that of your
sex, and with some regret I confess, that the ideas you have
often heard me express in favor of female intellectual power
are founded in what I have imagined more than in what I have
seen, except in you."

In those days an educated woman was among the rarest of rarities. The
wives of many of our most renowned revolutionary leaders were
surprisingly illiterate. Except the noble wife of John Adams, whose
letters form so agreeable an oasis in the published correspondence of
the time, it would be difficult to mention the name of one lady of the
revolutionary period who could have been a companion to the _mind_ of
a man of culture. Mrs. Burr, on the contrary, was the equal of her
husband in literary discernment, and his superior in moral judgment.
Her remarks, in her letters to her husband, upon the popular authors
of the day, Chesterfield, Rousseau, Voltaire, and others, show that
she could correct as well as sympathize with her husband's taste