Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. LAW STUDIES THE BAR TRIAL OF BURR. 1'. i i M i my own master, since the death of my mother, I next transferred myself, in my nineteenth year, from college to the law office, in Petersburg, of David Robinson, Esquire, a very learned scholar and barrister, originally imported from Scotland, as a tutor, by my grandfather. The young man, born a generation too late to come under the ferule of the family pedagogue, was now affectionately claimed as a law pupil by this12 Hus Trial. Mr. Robinson, in my time, had but two other students in his office— Thomas Ruffin and John F. May. The first of these and the autobiographer did not chance to meet from 1806 to 1853, a period of forty-seven years, when Mr. R., Chief Justice of North Carolina, came to New York as a lay member of the General Protestant Episcopal Convention. The greeting between them was boyishly enthusiastic. The chief justice, at the table of the soldier, said: " Friend Scott, it is not a little remarkable, that of the three law students, in the same office, in 1805 and 1806—all yet in good preservation—uur friend Hay has loug been at the head of the bar in veteran of the bar, who, living, down to 1833, in the practice of all the charities of life toward high and low, within his sphere, is likely to have continued to him a great professional longevity by his able reports of the debates in the Virginia Convention on the adoption of the Federal Constitution, and the trial for high treason of ex-Vice-President Aaron Burr. I had just ridden my first circuit, as an incipient man of law, when, like a vast multitude of others, including the flower of the land, I hastened up to Richmond to witness a scene of the highest interest. Aaron Burr, of the city of New York, a distinguished officer of the Revolution...