ITHOUT A COUNTRY.

PHILIP NOLAN was as fine a young officer as there was in the "Legion
of the West," as the Western division of our army was then called.
When Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans
in 1805, at Fort Massac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as
the Devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow; at
some dinner-party, I think. Burr marked him, talked to him, walked
with him, took him a day or two's voyage in his flat-boat, and, in
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, Honourable Aaron Burr, appeared again under a very
different aspect. There were rumours 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
cottonwood 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 A