“Was Hamilton a gentleman?” asks a popinjay Frenchman.
Aaron’s black eyes blaze: “Sir,” says he, “I met him!”
“Colonel Burr,” observes a dull, thick Englishman, who imagines himself a student of governments—“Colonel Burr, I have read your Constitution. I find it not always clear. Who is to expound it?”
Aaron leads our student of governments to the window, and points, with a whimsical smile, at the Broadway throngs that march below.
“Sir,” he remarks, “they are the expounders of our Constitution.”
Aaron, at seventy-eight, does a foolish thing; he marries—marries the wealthy Madam Jumel.
They live in the madam’s great mansion on the heights overlooking the Harlem. Three months later they part, and Aaron goes back to his books and his pipe and his wine, in his rooms by the Bowling Green.
It is a bright morning; Aaron and his friend Van Ness are walking in Broadway. Suddenly Aaron halts and leans against the wall of a house—the City Hotel.
“It is a numbness,” says he. “I cannot walk!”
The good, purple, puffy Dr. Hosack comes panting to the rescue. He finds the stricken one in his rooms where Van Ness has brought him.