"Let my father see my son sometimes. Do not be unkind towards him whom I have loved so much, I beseech you. Burn all my papers except my father's letters, which I beg you to return to him. Adieu, my sweet boy. Love your father, be grateful and affectionate to him while he lives, be the pride of his meridian, the support of his departing days. Be all that he wishes, for he made your mother happy." After expressing a wish that she may not be stripped and washed according to the usual custom, being pure enough to return to dust, she concludes: "If it does not appear contradictory or silly, I beg to be kept as long as possible before I am consigned to the earth." Alston, who survived her but four years, wrote heart-brokenly to her father: "My boy, my wife, gone both! This, then, is the end of all the hopes we had formed. You may well observe that you feel severed from the human race. She was the last tie that bound us to the species. What have we left? Yet, after all, he is a poor actor who cannot sustain his hour upon the stage, be his part what it may. But the man who has been deemed worthy of the heart of Theodosia Burr, and who has felt what it was to be blessed with such a woman's love, will never forget his elevation." ELIZABETH PATTERSON (MADAME JEROME BONAPARTE) The city into which Baltimore Town was legislated on the last day of the year 1796 already fostered within its limits the germ of the dual life, social and commercial, to which it has owed its subsequent eminence. Not infrequently, in the days of its inception, the same roof sheltered drawing-room and warehouse, the earlier merchants deeming it necessary to keep their growing interests constantly beneath their personal vigilance. Later, the commercial life crowded out the domestic life, and merchants built their dwellings--stately bricks or frames, painted blue, yellow, or white, facing on avenues of locust-trees--in another part of the town, all bearing quaint evidence of the far-away ports with which their vessels traded, while the whole town was permeated with the odor peculiar to shipping districts. The first theatre troupe that took the town by storm played in one of the old warehouses, whose walls re-echoed the approbation of the pleasure-hungry audience, among whom were no fastidious critics to pick flaws in "King Richard III.," and still less in "A Miss in her Teens," which followed. Baltimore never had the qualms of conscience which afflicted some of her puritanical sister towns concerning the pleasures in which she might rightly indulge. She looked out upon life, rather, with a liberality of mental vision which partook of the breadth of the seas her merchantmen traversed. The brick theatre built in 1781 became one of the most revered spots in the town, and when the actors came her way, Baltimore turned out _en masse_ to give them royal welcome.