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 Adams, got up, for spectacles, a string of courts-martial on the officers there.  One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence enough—­that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any whither with anyone who would follow him had the order been signed, “By command of His Exc.  A. Burr.”  The courts dragged on.  The big flies escaped, rightly for all I know.  Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that, when the president of the court asked him at the close whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy—­

“Damn the United States!  I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”