The Memoirs also contain the following rhapsody, in relation to a young American officer, meaning Aaron Burr:
"May these pages one day meet the eye of him who subdued my virgin heart. * * * * To him I plighted my virgin vow. * * * With this conqueror of my soul, how happy should I now have been! What storms and tempests should I have avoided (at least I am pleased to think so) if I had been allowed to follow the bent of my inclinations. Ten thousand times happier should I have been with him in the wildest desert of our native country, the woods affording us our only shelter, and their fruits our only repast, than under the canopy of costly state, with all the refinements of courts, with the royal warrior (the Duke of York), who would have fain proved himself the conqueror of France. My conqueror was engaged in another cause; he was ambitious to obtain other laurels. He was a colonel in the American army, and high in the estimation of his country. His victories were never accompanied with one gloomy, relenting thought. They shone as bright as the cause which achieved them."
After Miss Moncrieffe's return to her father, she married, and took her husband's name, which was Coghlan. Her conduct towards her husband proved but too plainly that her heart was elsewhere. She became widely known as a gay woman, and the name of Margaret Coghlan was frequently mentioned in the court and fashionable circles of Great Britain and France. Lords, dukes, and members of Parliament sought her acquaintance, and she was alternately reveling in wealth and sunken in poverty. But through all the changes, adventures, and vicissitudes of her varied and inconstant life, she appears to have entertained for Burr, "the conqueror of her soul," the most ardent respect and admiration.
Soon after the departure of Miss Moncrieffe, Burr was called into active service.
Putnam was on Long Island with Major Burr as his aid-de-camp, when the British landed near Utrecht and Gravesend, on the south-west end of the island. This was on the 22d of August 1776.
The battle was fought on the 27th, in which the Americans lost, in killed and wounded, and prisoners, one thousand men. The loss of the British was little more than a third of that number.
The result is not surprising when we consider the superiority of the enemy, who had a force of twenty thousand men—the Americans but twelve hundred.
The Americans were driven within the works which they had thrown up, and before the British had commenced their attack, a retreat was ordered.
A thick fog probably saved our army from distruction. Under cover of the heavy mist, the whole army, nine thousand in number, with all
