Judge Custis looked at the meek old gentleman closely, sitting at his plate like a lay brother in some monastery or infirmary, indifferent to talk or news or affairs; and the remembrance of what he had been—keen, accumulative, with youthful passions long retained, and the man buoyant under the judge's guard—impressed the Virginian to say to himself:

"What, then, is man! At last old age asserts itself, and bends the brazen temple of his countenance, like Samson, in almost pious remorse. There sits twenty-five years of equity administration; behind it, thirty years of jocund and various life. No newspaper shall ever record it, because none are printed here; he is indifferent to that forgetfulness and to all others, because the springs of life are dry in his body, and he no more enjoys."

"Are you travelling north, Judge Custis?" the old man asked, for politeness' sake.

"Yes, to Dover."

"There is a seat in my carriage; you are welcome to it."

"I will take it a part of the way, at least, to feel the privilege of your society, Chancellor."

The old man gave a slow, sidewise shake of his head.

"Too late, too late," he said, "to flatter me. I was fond of it once. I have been a flatterer, too."

The Chancellor's black boy was put on the Judge's horse, and the two men, in a plain, country-made, light, square vehicle, turned the court-house corner for the north. As they passed the door they heard the sheriff knock off two slaves to a purchaser, crying:

"Your property, sir, till they are twenty-five years of age."

"Ha, ha!" laughed, in a great horse laugh, a nearly chinless villager; "say till ole Patty Cannon can git 'em!"

The purchaser gave a cunning, self-convicted smile at the passing chancellor, whose look of resignation only deepened and grew more humble. The Judge had some vague recollection which moved him to change the subject.

"We see each other but little, Chancellor, though we divide the same little heritage of land. I suppose your people are all proud of Delaware."

"Yes," said the old man; "being such a little adventurer, a mere foundling in the band of states, our people have the pride of their independence. The laws are administered, some more farms are opened in the forest every year, blossoms come, and old men die and are buried on their farms, and their bones respected a few years. Our history is so pastoral that we must show some temper when it is assailed, or we might let out our ignorance of it."

They rode in silence some hours through an older settled and more open country, with some large mill-ponds and a better class of farm improvements, and the sense of some large water near at hand was mystically felt.

The Judge followed the old man's eyes at one place, seeing that they were raised with an expression of tranquil satisfaction, like aged piety, and a beautiful landscape of soft green marsh lay under their gaze from a slight elevation they had reached, showing cattle and sheep roving in it, tall groves where cows and horses found midday shade, and winding creeks, carrying sails of hidden boats, as if in a magical cruise upon the velvet verdure. Haystacks and farm settlements stood out in the long levels, and sailing birds speckled the air. In the far distance lay something like more marsh, yet also like the clouds.

"It is the Delaware Bay," the Chancellor said.

They soon entered a well-built little town on a navigable creek, with a large mill-pond, sawmills, several vessels building on the stocks, and an air of superior vitality to anything Judge Custis had seen in Delaware. Here the Chancellor pointed out the late home of Senator Clayton's father, and, after the horses had been fed, they continued still northward, passing another small town on a creek near the marshes, and, a little beyond it, came to a venerable brick church, a little from the road, in a grove of oaks and forest trees.

"Here is Barrett's chapel," said the Chancellor; "celebrated for the plotting of the campaign between Wesley's native and English preachers for the conquest of America as soon as the crown had lost it."

They looked up over the broad-gabled, Quakerly edifice, with its broad, low door, high roof, double stories of windows, and a higher window in the gable, trim rows of arch-bricks over door and windows, and belt masonry; and heard the tall trees hush it to sleep like a baby left to them. Nearly fifty feet square, and probably fifty years old, it looked to be good for another hundred years.

"My family in Accomac was harsh with the Methodists through a mistaken conservatism," Judge Custis said. "They are a good people; they seem to suit this peninsula like the peachtree."

A small funeral procession was turning into Barrett's chapel, and the Chancellor interrogated one of the more indifferent followers as to the dead person. Having mentioned the name, the citizen said:

"His death was mysterious. He was a Methodist and a good man, but it seems that avarice was gnawing his principles away. A slave boy, soon to become free by law, disappeared from his possession, and he gave it out that the boy had run away. But suddenly our neighbor began to drink and to display money, and they say he had the boy kidnapped. He died like one with an attack of despair."

As they turned again northward, in the genial afternoon, Judge Custis said:

"What a stigma on both sides, Chancellor, is this kidnapping!"

The old man meekly looked down and did not reply. Judge Custis, feeling that there was some sensitiveness on this and kindred subjects, yet why he could not recollect, continued, under the impulse of his feelings:

"The night before I left Princess Anne, Joe Johnson, one of your worst kidnappers, boldly came to my house for lodging. Why I let him stay there is a subject of wonder and contempt to myself. But there he was, perhaps when I came away."

"Not a prudent thing to permit," the old man groaned.

"I knew his wife was the widow of a gallows' bird, one Brereton—the name is Yankee. He was hanged for highway robbery."

A muffled sound escaped the sober old gentleman of Delaware.

"You should remember the murder, Chancellor. It happened in this state. This Brereton killed a slave-buyer for what he brought here upon his person to buy the kidnapped free people and apprentice-slaves. Brereton was the son-in-law of Patty Cannon, that infamous pander between Delaware and the South."

The old Chancellor looked up.

"I wish to anticipate you," he said, "in what you might further say with truth, but perhaps do not fully know. The murderer, Brereton, was the son-in-law of Patty Cannon, it is true; but he was also the brother-in-law of myself."

"Impossible!" Judge Custis said.

"Yes, sir; I married his sister."

The old Chancellor again turned his eyes to the ground.

"Great heavens!" exclaimed the Judge; "how many curious things can be in such a little state!"

It was in the middle of the afternoon that Judge Daniel Custis rode into a small town on an undulating plain, around two sides of which, at hardly half a mile distance, ran a creek through a pretty wooded valley, and a third side was bounded by a branch of the same creek, all winding through copse, splutter-dock, lotus-flower, and marsh to the Delaware Bay.

At the centre of the town, on the swell or crest of alluvial soil, of a light sandy loam foundation, an oblong public square, divided by a north and south street, contained the principal dwellings of the place, one of which was the Delaware State Capitol, a red-brick building, a little older than the American Constitution, with a bell-crowned cupola above its centre, and thence could be seen the Delaware Bay.

Near the state-house stood the whipping-post in the corner, humble as a hitching-post, and the brick jail hid out of the way there also, like an unpresentable servant ever cringing near his master's company. Various buildings, generally antique, surrounded this prim, Quakerly square, some brick, and with low portals, others smart, and remodelled to suit the times; some were mere wooden offices or huts, with long dormers falling from the roof-ridge nearly to the eaves, like a dingy feather from a hat-crown, with a jewel in the end; and one was an old steep-roofed hotel, painted yellow, with a long, lounging side.

At diagonal corners of this square, as far apart as its space would permit, two venerable doctors' homes still stood, which had given more repute to Delaware's little capital than its jurists or statesmen,—the former residence of Sykes the surgeon and Miller the pathologist and writer.

It was at the former of these houses, a many-windowed, tall, side-fronting house of plastered brick, with side office and centre door, that Judge Custis stopped and hitched his horse to a rack near the state-house adjoining. The sound of twittering birds fell from the large elms, willows, and maples on the square, and Custis could see the robins running in the grass.

From the door of the two-storied side office the sound of a violin came tenderly, and the Judge waited until the tune was done, when loud exclamations of pleasure, the clapping of hands, and the stamping of feet, showed that the fiddler was not alone.

Presenting himself at the door, Judge Custis was immediately confronted by a large, tall man, fully six feet high, with a strong countenance and sandy hair, who carried the fiddle and bow in his hand, and with the other hand seized Judge Custis almost affectionately, and drew him in, crying:

"Why, how is my old friend? Goy! how does he do? Who could have expected you on this simple occasion? Sit down there and take my own chair! Not that little one—no, the big easy-chair for my old friend! Goy!"

As Judge Custis cast his eye around, to note the company, the demonstrative host, with a flash of his gray-blue eyes, whispered,

"Who is he? who is he?"

"A Custis," whispered a person hardly the better off for his drams; "I reckon he is, by the lips and skin."

"Goy!" rapidly spoke the fiddler. "Friend Custis—I know my heart does not deceive me!—let me introduce you to the very essence of grand old little Delaware: here is Bob Frame, the ardent spirit of our bar; this is James Bayard, our misguided Democratic favorite; here is Charley Marim and Secretary Harrington, and my esteemed friend Senator Ridgely, and my cousin, Chief-justice Clayton. We are all here, and all honored by such a rare guest. Goy!"

As the Judge went through the hand-shaking process, the tall, well-fed host stooped to the convivial person again, and, with his hand to the side of his mouth, and an air of solemn cunning, whispered:

"Where from?"

"Accomac, or Somerset, I reckon," muttered the other.

"Now," exclaimed the host, taking both of Judge Custis's hands, "how do our dear friends all get along in Somerset and Accomac? Where do you call home now, Friend Custis? How are our old friends Spence and Upshur, and Polk and Franklin and Harry Wise? Goy! how I love our neighbors below."

There was a strength of articulation and physical emphasis in the speaker that the Judge noted at once, and it was attended with a beaming of the eyes and a fine fortitude of the large jaws that made him nearly magnetic.

"And this is John M. Clayton?" said the Judge. "We are not so far off that we have not fully heard of you. And now, since I belong to a numerous family, let me identify myself, Clayton, as Daniel Custis, late Judge on the Eastern Shore."

"Judge Custis! Daniel Custis! Friends," looking around, "what an honor! Think of it! The eminent American manufacturer! The creator of our industries! The friend of Mr. Clay and the home policy! Bayard, you need not shake your head! Ridgely, pardon my patriotic enthusiasm! Look at a man, my friends, at last! Goy!"

As the Judge listened to various affirmations of welcome, Mr. Clayton, with one eye winked and the other resting on Lawyer Frame, the ardent spirit of the bar, made the motion with his lips:

"Cambridge?"

"No; Princess Anne."

"And dear old Princess Anne, how does she fare?"—he had again turned to the Judge—"how is the little river Wicomico—no, I mean Manokin—how does it flow? Does it flow benevolently? Does it abound in the best oysters I ever tasted? in tarrapin, too? How is she now? Goy!"

"Are you on your way north, Brother Custis, or going home?" the keen, black-eyed Chief-justice asked.

"No, my journey is ended. I came to Dover to be acquainted with Mr. Clayton."

"Aunt Braner. Hyo! Come yer, Aunt Braner!" the host cried loudly, and an old colored woman came in, closely followed by some of her grandchildren, who stood, gazing, at the door. "Take this gentleman and give him the best room in my house. The best ain't good enough for him! Take him right up and give him water and make your son bresh him, and we'll send him the best julep in Kent County. Goy!"

"De bes' room was Miss Sally's, Mr. Clayton," the old woman answered.

A sudden change came over the highly prompt and sanguine face of the host; he hesitated, wandered in the eyes, and caught himself on the words:

"No, give him the Speaker Chew room: that'll suit him best."

As the Judge followed the servant out, the young Senator emptied his mouth of a large piece of tobacco into a monster spittoon that a blind man could hardly miss, and, with a face still long and silent, and much at variance with his previous spontaneity, he absently inquired:

"What can he want? what can he want?"

One of the small negro children had meantime toddled in at the door, and, with large, liquid eyes in its solemn, desirous face, laid hands on the fiddle and looked up at Mr. Clayton.

"Bless the little child!" he suddenly said. "Wants a tune? Well!"

Placing himself in a large chair, the young Senator tilted it back till his hard, squarish head rested against the mantel, and he felt along the strings almost purposelessly, till the plaintive air came forth:

"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon! How can ye bloom so fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I so full of care?

Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird, That sings beside thy mate; For so I sat, and so I sang, And wist not of my fate."

He closed his eyes on the strains, and a thickening at his throat, and movement of his broad, athletic chest, as he continued the air, showed that he was inwardly laboring with some strong emotion.

His cousin, the Chief-justice, made a signal with his hat, and one by one the sitters stole out into the square noiselessly, and went their ways, leaving the young man playing on, with the negro child at his knee, leaning there as if to spy out the living voice in his violin.

Other children came to the door—white children from the square, black children from the garden—and some ventured a little way in to hear the tender wooing of the sympathetic strings. He moved his bow mechanically, but the music sprang forth as if it knew its sister, Grief, was waiting on the chords. At last a bolder child than the rest came and pushed his elbow and said,

"Papa!"

"My boy, my dear boy!" the fiddler cried, as tears streamed down his cheeks, and he lifted the lad to his heart and kissed him.

Judge Custis, though no word passed upon the subject, saw the solitary canker at the Senator's heart—his wife's dead form in the old Presbyterian kirk-yard.

It was soon apparent to Judge Custis, from this and other silent things, that a light-hearted, affectionate, strong, yet womanly, engine of energy constituted the young Delaware lawyer-politician. Keen, cunning, impulsive, hopeful, his feet provincial, his head among the birds, he combined facility and earnestness in almost mercurial relations to each other, and the Judge saw that these must constitute a remarkable jury lawyer.

His face was shaven smooth; his throat and chin showed an early tendency to flesh; the poise of his head and thoughtful darting of his eyes and slight aqualinity of his nose indicated one who loved mental action and competition, yet drew that love from a great, healthy body that had to be watched lest it relapse into indolence. The loss of his wife so soon after marriage had been followed by nearly complete indifference to women, and he had made politics his only consolation and mistress, harnessing her like a young mare with his old roadster of the law, and driving them together in the slender confines of his principality, and then locking the law up among his office students to drive politics into the national arena at Washington.

"You require to be very neighborly, Clayton, in a small bailiwick like this?" the Judge inquired, as they strolled along the square in the soft evening.

"We have the best people in the world in Delaware, friend Custis: few traders, little law, scarcely any violence, and they are easy to please; but it is a high offence in this state not to be what is called 'a clever man.' You must stop, whatever be your errand, and smile and inquire of every man at his gate for every individual member of his household. The time lost in such kind, trifling intercourse is in the aggregate immense. But, Goy! I do love these people."

"It seems to me that you encourage that exaction."

"Well, I do. As an electioneerer, I can get away with any of 'em. Goy! Why, Jim Whitecar, Lord bless your dear soul!"—this addressed to a thick-set, sandy, uncertain-looking man who was about retreating into the Capitol Tavern—"what brings you to town, Jim?"

"It's a free country, I reckon," exclaimed the suspicious-looking man.

"Goy! that's so, Jimmy. We're all glad to see you in Dover behaving of yourself, Jim. Now don't give me any trouble this year, friend Jimmy. Behave yourself, and be an honor to your good parents that I think so much of. Oblige me, now!"

As they turned to cross the middle of the square, Clayton said:

"I'll have him at that whipping-post, hugging of it, one of these days."

"What is he?"

"A kidnapper down here in Sockum, and a bad one: a dangerous fellow, too. I hear he says if I ever push him to the extremity of his co-laborer, Joe Johnson—whom I sent to the post and then saved from cropping—that he'll kill me. Goy!"—Mr. Clayton looked around a trifle apprehensively—"I'm ready for him."

"Delaware kidnapping is a great institution," Custis said.

"It has an antiquity and extent you would hardly believe, friend Custis. Long before our independence, in the year 1760, the statutes of Delaware had to provide against it. Our laws have never permitted the domestic slave-trade with other states."

The little place seemed to have a good society, and the beauty of the young girls sitting at the doors or walking in the evening showed something of the florid North Europe skins, Batavian eyes, and rotund Dutch or Quaker figures.

As they returned to the public square, a room in the tavern, almost brilliantly lighted for that day of candles, displayed its windows to the gaze of Clayton, who exclaimed:

"Goy! that is surely John Randel, Junior."

"That distinguished engineer?" observed his visitor, who had been waiting all the evening to broach the subject of his errand. "I have the greatest admiration of him. Shall we call on him?"

"Why, yes, yes," answered Clayton, dubiously; "I'm not afraid of him. I—goy! I owe him nothing. He is such a litigious fellow, though; so persistent with it; barratry, champetry, mad incorrigibility: he's the wildest man of genius alive. But come on!"

Knocking at a door on the second floor, a sharp, prompt reply came out:

"Come!"

A middle-sized man, with a large head and broad shoulders, and cloth leggings, buttoned to above his knee, sat in a nearly naked, carpetless room, writing, his table surrounded by burning wax candles, and his countenance was proud and intense. Mr. Clayton rushed upon him and seized his hand:

"How is my friend Randel? The indefatigable litigant, the brilliant engineer, to whom ideas, goy! are like persimmons on the tree, abundant, but seldom ripe, and only good when frosted. How is he now and what is he at?"

"Stand there," spoke the engineer, "and look at me while I read the sentence I was finishing upon John Middleton Clayton of Delaware."

"Go it, Randel! Now, Custis, he'll put a wick in me and just set me afire. Goy!"

"'It is the curse of lawyers,'" the unrelaxing stranger read, "'to let their judgment for hire, from early manhood, to easy clients, or to suppress it in the cringing necessities of popular politics: hence that residue and fruit of all talents, the honest conviction of a man's bravest sagacity, perishes in lawyers' souls ere half their powers are fledged: they become the registers of other men, they think no more than wax.'"

Here Mr. Randel blew out one of the candles. The illustration was cogent. Mr. Clayton lighted it again with another candle.

"There's method in his madness, Custis," he said, with a wink. "Let me introduce my great friend to you, Randel?"

"Stop there," the engineer repeated, sternly, "till I have read my sentence. 'Seldom it is that a lawyer of useful parts, in a community as detached and pastoral as the State of Delaware, has a cause appealing to his manliness, his genius, and his avarice, like this of John Randel, Junior, civil engineer! No equal public work will probably be built in the State of Delaware during the lifetime of the said Clayton. No fee he can earn in his native state will ever have been the reward of a lawyer there like his who shall be successful with the suit of John Randel, Junior, against the Canal Company. No principle is better worth a great lawyer's vindication than that these corporations, in their infancy, shall not trample upon the private rights of a gentleman, and treat his scholarship and services like the labor of a slave.'"

"Well said and highly thought," interposed Judge Custis.

"'The said Clayton,'" continued John Randel, still reading, "'refuses the aid of his abilities to a stranger and a gentleman inhospitably treated in the State of Delaware.'"

"No, no," cried Clayton; "that is a charge against me I will not permit."

"'The said Clayton,'" read Randel, inflexibly, "'with the possibilities of light, riches, and honor for himself, and justice for a fellow-man, chooses cowardice, mediocrity—and darkness. He extinguishes my hopes and his.'"

With this, Mr. Randel, by a singular fanning of his hands and waft of his breath, put out all the candles at once and left the whole room in darkness.

Judge Custis was the first to speak after this extraordinary illustration:

"Clayton, I believe he has a good case."

"That is not the point now," Mr. Clayton said, with rising spirit and emphasis. "The point now is, 'Am I guilty of inhospitality?' Goy! that touches me as a Delawarean, and is a high offence in this little state. It is true that this suitor is a stranger. He comes to me with an introduction from my brilliant young friend, Mr. Seward, of New York, who vouches for him. But the corporation he menaces is also entitled to hospitality: it is, in the main, Philadelphia capital. Girard himself, that frugal yet useful citizen, is one of its promoters. My own state, and Maryland, too, have interests in this work. Is it the part of hospitality to be taking advantage of our small interposing geography, and laying by the heels, through our local courts, a young, struggling, and, indeed, national undertaking?"

"Let the courts of your state, which are pure, decide between us," said John Randel, Junior, relighting the candles with his tinder-box.

"No lawyer ought to refuse the trial of such a public cause because of any state scruples," Judge Custis put in, in his grandest way. "That is not national; it is not Whig, Brother Clayton." The Judge here gave his entire family power to his facial energy, and expressed the Virginian and patrician in his treatment of the Delaware bourgeois and plebeian. "Granted that this corporation is young and untried: let it be disciplined in time, that it may avoid more expensive mistakes in the future. No cause, to a true lawyer, is like a human cause; the time may come when the talent of the American bar will be the parasite of corporations and monopolists, but it is too early for that degradation for you and me, Senator Clayton. The rights of a man involve all progress; progress, indeed, is for man, not man for progress. As a son of Maryland, if he came helpless and penniless to me, I would not let this gentleman be sacrificed."

"If I were a rich man, Clayton would take my case," the engineer said; "my poverty is my disqualification in his eyes."

He again essayed, in a dramatic way, to fan out the candles, but his breath failed him; his hands became limp, and then hastily covered his eyes, and he sank to the table with a groan, and put his head upon it convulsively.

"Gentlemen," he uttered, in a voice touching by its distress, "oh! gentlemen, professional life—my art—is, indeed, a tragedy."

The easy sensibilities of Judge Custis were at once moved. Senator Clayton, looking from one to the other in nervous indecision, seeing Custis's dewy eyes, and Randel's proud breaking down, was himself carried away, and shouted:

"I goy! This is a conspiracy. But, Randel, I'll take your case; I can't see a man cry. Goy!"

As they all arose sympathetically and shook hands, a knock came on the door, and there was a call for Mr. Clayton. He returned in a few minutes, with a rather grim countenance, and said:

"Randel, I have just declined a big round retaining-fee to defend the very suit your tears and Brother Custis's have persuaded me to prosecute. But, goy! a tear always robbed me of a dollar."

"This sympathy to-day will make you an independent man for life," exclaimed the engineer.

"I have done Milburn's first errand right," Judge Custis thought; "five minutes' delay would have been fatal."



CHAPTER XXXII.

GARTER-SNAKES.

At Princess Anne Vesta had moved her husband to Teackle Hall, and he occupied her father's room and seemed to be growing better, though the doctor said that he had best be sent to the hills somewhere.

The free woman, Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus sent to Vesta, had arrived very opportunely, and took Aunt Hominy's place in the kitchen, where all the children's echoes were gone, the poor woman's own bereavement thrilling the ears of Virgie, Roxy, and Vesta herself; but, alas! her tale was not legal testimony, because she was a little black.

Jack Wonnell had found unexpected favor in Meshach Milburn's eyes, and was appointed to sleep in the store and watch it; and there Roxy came down in the twilights, and, with pity more than affection, heard him weave the illusion of his love for her, willing to be amused by it, because it was so sincere with him; for Jack was all lover, and meek and artful, bold and domestic, soft and outlawed, as the houseless Thomas cat that makes highways of the fences, and wooes the demurest kitten forth by the magic of his purring.

"Roxy," said Jack, "I'm a-goin' to git you free, gal, fur I 'spect Meshach Milburn will give me a pile o' money fur a-watchin' of the sto'. Then we'll go to Canaday, whar, I hearn tell, color ain't no pizen, an' we'll love like the white doves an' the brown, that both makes the same coo, so happy they is."

"Jack," said the soft-eyed, pitying maid, "you're a pore foolish fellow, but I like to hear you talk. I reckon there is no harm in you. Virgie is in love, too, with a white man, but you mustn't breathe it."

"Never," said Jack, making solemn motions with his eyes, and cuddling closer in dead earnest of sympathy. "Hope I may die! Can't tell, to save my life! Who-oop! Tell me, Roxy!"

"Pore sister Virgie, she was made to love, and, though it's hopeless, I think she loves Mr. Tilghman, our minister, because he loved Miss Vesty once, and Virgie worships Miss Vesty like her sister."

* * * * *

Vesta told the story of Mary, the free woman, to her husband, who listened closely and said:

"I know of but one thing, my darling, that will make such ignorance and cruelty fade out in the forests of this peninsula: an iron road. A new thing, called the railroad-engine, has just been made by an Englishman, one George Stephenson, and a specimen of it has been sent to New York, where I have had it examined. The errand your father went to do for me, he has done well. I shall send him to Annapolis next, to get a charter for a railroad up this peninsula that will pass inside the line of Maryland, and penetrate every kidnapping settlement hidden there, and light, intercourse, and law shall exterminate such barracoons as Johnson's."

Vesta was glad to hear her father praised by her husband, and hopes rekindled of some happier family reunion, when she should feel the heartache die within her that now raged intermittently during her vestal honeymoon. A letter came on the fourth day which dashed these hopes to the ground, and it was as follows:

"DORCHESTER COUNTY, MD., October—, 1829.

"Darling Niece,—Idol of my heart, let me begin by entreating you to take a conservative course when I break the sad intelligence to you of the death of my dear sister, Lucy, at Cambridge, yesterday, of the heart disease. She was the star of the house of McLane. She is gone. 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, and I shall take a conservative though consistent course on the parties who have inflicted this injury upon you, my dear niece, and upon your calm and collected, if stricken, uncle.

"'The Lord moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform,' and his humble instruments require only to be inflexible and conservative to do all things well. Be assured that righteousness shall be done upon the adversaries of our family, and that right speedily. My own grief is composed in the satisfaction I shall take, and the assurance that your sainted mother is where the wicked cease from troubling.

"The financial arrangements of my dear sister were of the most conservative and high-toned character, as was to have been expected of her.

"You may be desirous, my outraged, but, I hope, still spirited, idol, to hear the particulars of Lucy's death. She did not reach Cambridge till near midnight, having made the long journey from Princess Anne without fitting companions, and, in the excited state of her feelings, after she left Vienna in the evening, a depression of the spirits, accompanied by a fluttering of the heart, came on, and rapidly increased, and, by the time she arrived at our relatives', she was nearly dead with nervous apprehension and weakness. On seeing me, she revived sufficiently to make her will in the most sisterly and conservative manner.

"A physician was procured, but he pronounced her system so debilitated and detoned as hardly probable to outride the shock, the nervous centres being depressed and atrophy setting in.

"She talked incessantly about the Entailed Hat, and said it was a permanent shadow and weight upon your heart, and made me promise to mash it, if it could conservatively be done.

"I read to my dear sister from the Book of Books, and tried to compose her feelings, but she broke out ever and anon, 'Oh, Brother Allan! to think I have raised children to be bought and sold, and married to foresters and trash.' She was deeply sensitive as to what would be said about it in Baltimore.

"Just before she died, she said, 'Do not bury me at Princess Anne, where that fiend can come near me with his frightful Hat! Take me to Baltimore, where there are no bog-ores, nor old family chattels, to disturb the respectability of death. Apologize for my daughter, and do her justice.'

"And so this grand woman died, in the confidence of a blessed immortality, leaving us to vindicate her motives and continue her conservative course, and to meet at her funeral next Friday, at our church in Baltimore, where Rev. John Breckenridge will preach the funeral sermon over this murdered saint.

"With conservative, yet proud, grief, "Affectionately, your uncle, "ALLAN McLANE."

"Oh, sir!" Vesta exclaimed, turning blindly towards her husband; "mother is dead. Where can I turn?"

"Where but to me, poor soul!" Milburn replied, knowing nothing of Mrs. Custis's late feelings against him. "Your father shall be notified, and I am able to attend the funeral with you."

"It is in Baltimore," Vesta sobbed.

"Well, honey, there I am ordered by the doctor to go, and get above the line of malaria, in the hills. I can make the effort now."

Her grief and loneliness deprived her of the will to refuse him. Roxy was selected to be her mistress's maid upon the journey, and William Tilghman and Rhoda Holland were to take them in the family carriage down to Whitehaven landing for the evening steamer.

Jack Wonnell, in officious zeal to be useful, gathered flowers, and hung around Teackle Hall to run errands; and, in order not to exasperate Vesta's husband, appeared bareheaded as the party set off, Milburn's hat-box being one of the articles of travel, and Milburn vouchsafing these words to Jack:

"There is a dollar for you, Mr. Wonnell. I rely upon you to watch my old store and conduct yourself like a man."

"I'll do it," answered Jack, grinning and blushing; "hope I may die! Good-bye, Miss Vesty. Purty Roxy, don't you forgit me 'way off thair in Balt'mer. I'll teach Tom to sing your name befo' you ever see me agin."

He waved his arms, with real tears dimming his vision, and Roxy affected to shed some tears also, as she waved good-bye to Virgie, whose eyes were turned with wistful pain upon the beautiful face of her mistress receding down the vista. Vesta threw her a kiss and reclined her head upon her husband's shoulder.

That evening, an hour before the carriage was to return, Virgie and the free woman, Mary, walked together down to Milburn's store, to see if Jack Wonnell was on the watch. As they trode in the soft grass and sand under the old storehouse they saw the bell-crowned hat—a new one, brought from the ancient stock that very day—shining glossily on Wonnell's high, eccentric head, as he sat in the hollow window of the old storehouse and talked to the mocking-bird, which he was feeding with a clam-shell full of boiled potato and egg, and some blue haws.

"Tom, say 'Roxy,' an' I'll give ye some, Tommy! Now, boy! 'Roxy, Roxy, purty Roxy! purty Roxy! Poor ole Jack! poor ole Jack!'"

The bird flew around Wonnell's head, biting at the hat which stood in such elegant irrelevance to the remainder of his dress, and cried, "Meshach, he! he! he! Vesty, she! Vesty, Meshach! Vesty, Meshach!" but said nothing the village vagrant would teach it. He showed the patience idleness can well afford, and, feeding it a little, or withholding the food awhile, continued to plead and teach:

"'Roxy, Roxy, purty Roxy! Poor, pore Jack! pore Jack!' Now, Tom, say 'Roxy, Roxy, pore Jack!'"

The bird flew and struck, and sang a little, very niggardly, and so, as the lights in the west sank and faded, the shiftless lover continued in vain to seek to give the bird one note more than the magician, his master, had taught.

The stars modestly appeared in the soft heavens, and Princess Anne gathered its roofs together like a camp of camels in the desert, and, with an occasional bleat or bark or human sound, seemed dozing out the soft fall night, absorbed, perhaps, in the spreading news of Mrs. Custis's death and Vesta's wedding-journey, that had to be taken at last.

"Miss Virgie," said the woman Mary—ten years her senior, but comely still—"have you ever loved like me? Oh, I had a kind husband, and, helpless as I was, I tried to love once more. Maybe it was a sin."

"I love my mistress as if she was myself," Virgie said; "I feel as if, in heaven, before we came here, I was with her, Mary! I love her father, too, as if he was not my master, but my friend. Oh, how I love them all! But what can I do to show my love—poor naked slave that I am? They say they will soon set me free. Mary, how do people feel when they are free?"

"They don't appreciate it," sighed Mary. "They go and put themselves in captivity again, like selfish things: they falls in love."

"But to love and be free!" Virgie said, her bosom glowing in the thought till her rich eyes seemed to shed warmth and starlight on her companion's face; "to give your own free love to some one and feel him grateful for it: what a gift and what a joy is that! He might be thankful for it, and, seeing how pure it was, he might respect me."

"Who is it, Virgie?" Mary said.

"Whoever would love me like a white girl!" the ardent slave softly exclaimed. "It must be some one who does not despise me. I hear Miss Vesta's beau, Master William, read the beautiful service, with his sweet, submissive face, and I think to myself, 'How freely he might have my heart to comfort his if he would take it like a gentleman!' I would be his slave to make him happy, if he could love me purely, like my mother! Oh, my mother, whose name I do not know! where is the tie that fastens me to heaven? Did my father love me?"

"Pore Jack! pore Jack! Sing 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy,' Tom!" coaxed Wonnell above to the sleepy bird.

"Whoever was your father, Virgie, your mother's love for you was pure. God makes the wickedest love their children, because he is the Father to all the fatherless."

"Oh! could my own father have brought me into the world and hated me?" Virgie said. "They say I am almost beautiful. Will he who gave me life never call me his, and say, 'My daughter, come to my respect, rest on my heart, and take my name'?"

"Poor Virgie!" sighed Mary; "remember we are black! We hardly ever have fathers: they is for white people."

"Dog my hide!" mumbled Wonnell, above, "ef a bird ain't a perwerse critter. Purty Roxy won't think I'm smart a bit ef I can't make Tom say 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy! Pore Jack!'"

"I am almost white," Virgie continued; "I want to be all white. Why can't I be so? The Lord knows my heart is white, and full of holy, unselfish love."

"Pore chile!" Mary said; "we shall all be washed and made white in the Lamb's blood, Virgie. That's where your soul pints you to, dear young lady. I know it ain't pride and rebellion in you: it's like I'm looking at my baby, white as snow to me and God now."

"Hush!" said Virgie, trembling, "what voice is that?"

There was an old willow-tree in a recessed spot at the end of the store, and by it were two sheds or small buildings, now disused, into one of which, with a door low to the ground, Mary drew Virgie, and they listened to a low voice saying,

"Dave, air your pops well slugged?"

"Yes, Mars Joe."

"Allan McLane pays fur the job?"

"Yes, Mars Joe."

"You can't mistake him, Dave. No shap is worn like that nowadays. Look only fur his headpiece, and aim well!"

"Yes, Mars Joe."

"Fur me," continued the other voice, "I'll go right to the tavern an' prove an alibi. My lay is to take the house gal that old Gripefist's young wife thinks so much of. I'll snake her out to-night. She's the property of Allan McLane, left him in his sister's will. They found on her body the paper giving the gal to the dead woman only two days before. She's Allan's to-morrow, but to-night she's mine!"

A sensual, sucking, chuckling sound, like a kiss made upon the back of his own hand, followed this significant threat; and Mary, placing her hand over the sinking slave girl's mouth, held her motionless.

"Tommy, Tommy! sing 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy! Pore Jack! Pore Jack!' Sing, Tommy, sing!"

"There," whispered the white man, softly, and was gone.

Mary breathed only the words to Virgie, "Kidnappers—come!" and they glided from the old tenement unobserved, and entered the copse along the stream.

"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! His leetle Roxy's gone away. Pore Jack! Roxy! Roxy! Roxy!" the mourner at the window above chattered sleepily to the nodding bird.

The negro at the corner of the old warehouse, half covered by the willow's shade, peered up with blood-shotten eyes to distinguish the covering on the bird-tamer's head.

He saw Jack Wonnell sitting backward on the window-frame, swaying in and out, as he lazily tempted the mocking-bird to sing, and once the bell-crown hat, so singular to view, came in full relief against the gray sky.

"It's ole Meshach," said the negro, silently, with desperate eyes. "I hoped it wasn't. Dar is de hat, sho!"

He cocked his huge horse-pistol, and took aim directly from below.

"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! I reckon Roxy won't have pore Jack, caze Tommy won't sing. Sing, Tommy, little Roxy's pet: 'Pore Jack! Pore—'"

The great horse-pistol boomed on the night, and in the smoke the negro rushed into the bush and sought the fields.

Down from his seat in the window-sill the witless villager came backward, all bestrewn, measuring his body in the sand, where he lay, silent as the other shadows, with his arms extended in the frenzy of death, and his mouth wide open and flowing blood.

Jack Wonnell had paid the penalty of being out of fashion.

The mocking-bird, aroused by the loud report, leaped into the empty window-sill to seek his tutor, and set up the lesson he had learned too late:

"Poor Jack! Poor Jack! Roxy! Roxy! Roxy!" came screaming on the night, and all was still.

* * * * *

William Tilghman was driving back from Whitehaven in the melancholy thoughts inspired by the departure of his cousin, whom he had at last seen go into the great wilderness of the world the passive companion of her husband, like the wife of Cain, driven forth with him, when the carriage was arrested at the ancient Presbyterian church—which overlooked Princess Anne from the opposite bank of the little river—by a woman almost throwing herself under the wheels.

"Why, Lord sakes! it's our Virgie!" cried Rhoda Holland.

The girl, with all the energy of dread, sprang into the carriage by William Tilghman's side and threw her arms around him:

"Save me! Save me!"

"What ails you, Virgie?" cried the young man, assuringly. "You are in no danger, child!"

"I am sold," the girl gasped, with terror on her tongue and in her wild eyeballs. "Miss Vesty's sold me to her Uncle Allan. He's sent the kidnappers after me. They're yonder, in Princess Anne. Oh, drive me to the North, to the swamps, anywhere but there!"

"I know your mistress made you over to her mother, Virgie, for a precaution, fearing you might not be safe in her own hands. She told me so, and asked if the death of her mother could possibly affect you."

"Oh, it has!" the girl whispered. "Mary knows the kidnapper that's come for me. He is the same that stole Hominy and the children. He kept her chained on an island. He says he'll have me to-night, to do as he pleases. Master McLane lets him have me!"

The girl, in her terror, as the carriage had descended the hill already and crossed the Manokin, seized the reins in Tilghman's hands and drew them with such frenzy that the horses, as they came to Meshach Milburn's store, were pulled into the open area before it, where something in their surprise or lying on the ground gave them immediate fright, and they dashed at a gallop into Front Street, the wheels passing over an object by the old storehouse that nearly upset the carriage.

The street they took for their run crossed a small arm of the Manokin, and led up to a gentleman's gate; but before this brook was crossed Tilghman, an experienced horseman and driver, had reined the flying animals into a nearly unoccupied street, called Back Alley, parallel with the main street of Princess Anne, but hidden from it by houses and gardens, and almost in a moment of time the whole town had been cleared, with hardly a person in it aware of such a vehicle going past.

It was a real runaway, but Tilghman, in a cool, gentle voice, like a brook's music, told the girls to sit perfectly still, as they had a clear, level road; and, seeing that he could not stop the animals by any mere exercise of strength, without danger to his harness, he waited for their power to wear out, or their fears to subside.

Rhoda Holland was ashamed to scream, if her pride was not too well aroused already in the presence of the muscular young minister, sitting there like an artillery teamster driving into battle, and his nostrils and jaws delineated in the gray air, expressed almost the joy he had long put by of following the hounds in the autumn fox-hunts, where Judge Custis said he had been the perfect pattern of a rider.

As for Virgie, she felt no fear of wild horses, since they were leaving behind the bloody hunters of men and women, and she almost wished it was herself alone, dashing at that frightful pace to destruction, until the young man, mindful, perhaps, of his mistress, torn from his sight to inhabit another's arms, and feeling that this poor quadroon was dear as a sister to Vesta's heart, bent down in the midst of his apprehensions and kissed the slave girl pityingly.

Then, with an instant's greater torrent of tears, a sense of rest and man's respect fell upon Virgie's soul, and she paid no heed to time or dangers till the carriage came to a stop in the deep forest sands several miles east of Princess Anne.

"William," said Rhoda Holland, "what air we to do to save Virgie? Uncle Meshach's gone. Jedge Custis is nobody knows whar, now. This yer Allan McLane, Aunt Vesty says, is dreffle snifflin' an' severe. I think it's a conspliracy to steal Virgie when they's all away. Misc Somers would take keer of her, but I'm afraid she'd tell somebody."

"Are you sure that you saw and heard truly?" the minister said to Virgie.

"Oh, yes. I saw the same man at Mr. Milburn's the day he was taken sick. He looked at me a low, familiar look, and muttered something evil. Mary knew him too well. Oh, do not take me back to Princess Anne. I will never go there again."

"It may be true," Tilghman reflected. "It probably is true. Vesta has no faith in Allan McLane. She says he makes money in the negro trade, with all his religious formality. He is the trustee already of Mrs. Custis's estate; no doubt, the administrator by will. He may have sent Joe Johnson to kidnap Virgie, under color of his right, and Johnson would abuse anybody. Vesta will never forgive us if we let Virgie go to him."

"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"

"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not anticipate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought you safest, you were most in peril."

They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the Furnace village.

"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."

"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground Road to the free states."

"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"

"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free, and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving her a wild beast's chance to run."

"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"

"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor." The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."

As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in the night.

In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out, its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond, lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's foreclosure.

A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the ponds and night-damps?

The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.

Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.

"Oh, may God let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "God bless you for the kiss you gave me, my dear white playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart is bursting: what can I say?"

"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night," the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."

"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my freedom, or die on the road to it."

"That is the spirit," the minister said; "we will buy it for you if we can, but get it for yourself if you can do it."

He kissed her again, with the instinct of a father to a child, and hastened to his horses and the hotel.

As Tilghman and Rhoda, at the earliest dawn, started for Princess Anne, the young girl suddenly turned and kissed her minister.

"Thar!" she said, "I think you just looked magnificens last night, sittin' behine them critters, like Death on the plale horse, an' lovin' Aunt Vesty, though she's gone away an' quit you, enough to fight for her pore, bright-skinned gal. I wish somebody would love me like that!"

"So you could quit him, too, Rhoda?"

"Well, William, I likes beaus that's couragelis! You're splendid a-preachin', but I like you better drivin' and showin' your excitemins."

"You are a beautiful girl," the clergyman said; "suppose you try to like me better."

The great question, being thus opened, was not disposed of when they reached Princess Anne, and quietly stabled the horses.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

HONEYMOON.

Meanwhile the steamer was taking Vesta and her husband across the Chesapeake Bay in the night—that greatest, gentlest indentation in the coast of the United States; at once river and sound, fiord and sea, smooth as the mill-pond, and full of life as the nutritious milk of the mother, and on whose breast a brood of rivers lay and suckled without rivalry—the long Susquehanna, James, and Potomac; the short, thick Choptank, Chester, and Patapsco; and, to the flying wild-swan, its arborage looked like a vast pine-tree, with boughs of snow, climbing two hundred miles from its roots in the land of corn and cotton into the golden cloud of Northern grain and hay.

Upon one broken horn of this fruitful bay hung Baltimore, like an eagle's nest upon the pine, seizing the point of indentation that brought it nearest to the fertile upland and the valley outlets of the North and West, where the toil-loving Germans burnished their farms with women's hands, and sent their long bowed teams to market on as many turnpikes as the Chesapeake had rivers.

At morning Vesta looked upon the fleet of little sail lying in the basin of the city, among larger ships and arks and barges, and saw Federal Hill's red clay rising a hundred feet above the piers, and the spotless monument to Washington resting its base as high above the tide, on a nearly naked bluff. The rich sunrise fell on the streaked flag of the republic at the mast on Fort McHenry, and the garrison band was playing the very anthem that lawyer Key had written in the elation of victory, though a prisoner in the enemy's hands. Alas! how many a prisoner in the enemy's hands was doing tribute to that flag from cotton-field and rice-swamp, tobacco land and corn-row, pouring the poetry of his loyalty and toil to the very emblem of his degradation!

Vesta heard, with both satisfaction and sorrow, at Barnum's Hotel that her husband was too ill to attend the funeral, and must keep his room and fire; she needed his comfort and devotion in her sorrow, but upon her dead mother's bier seemed to stand the injunction against that fateful hat he had brought with him; and yet she pitied him that he must stay alone, unknown, unrelated, chattering with the chill or burning without complaint.

"God send you sympathy from the angels like you, my darling!" Milburn said. "I know what it is to lose a mother."

Escorts in plenty waited on Vesta, but she wished she could find some kinsman of her husband, if ever so poor, to take his arm to the church and burial-ground; and at the news that her uncle Allan McLane had not arrived, and would not, probably, now be present, she felt another blending of relief and apprehension, because her husband might not to-day be exasperated by him, yet his relations to her mother's property would still remain unknown,—and Vesta feared for Virgie.

In the same impulse which had made her retain Teackle Hall, to secure it against her father's careless business methods, she had made Virgie over to her mother, to place her, apparently, farther from danger, never supposing that in those prudent hands the enemy might insinuate; but Death, the deathless enemy, was filching everywhere, and though she could not see why Virgie could be persecuted, Vesta now wished she had set her free.

The girl belonged to her mother's estate: suppose Allan McLane was the administrator of it? Suppose, indeed, he was the heir? Vesta's heart fell, as she considered that a woman had best let business alone.

The young bride-mourner was an object of mingled admiration and sympathy as she leaned on the arm of a kinsman and entered the Presbyterian kirk. She was considered one of the great beauties of Maryland, and the young Robert Breckenridge, fresh from Kentucky, on a visit to his brother, the pastor, thought he had never seen Vesta's equal even in Kentucky; and, as he gazed through her mourning veil, the pastor's Delaware wife heard him whisper, "Divinity itself!"

The clear olive skin, eyes of gray twilight, eyebrows like midnight's own arches, and luxuriant hair, were touched by grief as if a goddess suffered; and, in her deep mourning robes, Vesta seemed a monarch's daughter about to pass through some convent to her sainthood.

She had the height to give dignity to this beauty, and the grace to lift pathos above weakness.

The minister's musical tones were wrought to consonance with this noble human model, and he spoke of that ideal motherhood which, to every child at the bier, seems real as the dripping bucket at the fairy's well—of mother's love, trials, weakness, and immortality; of the absence of her sympathy making the first great bereavement in life's progress; of her nature abiding in us and her spirit hovering over, while we live.

Painted in the soft hues of personal experience, prescribed to her needs with a physician's art, doing all that funeral talk can do to raise the final tears from among the heartstrings and pour them in oblation upon the corpse, the pastor's consolation had the effect of some mesmeric hand that weakens our systems while it sublimates our feelings, and Vesta's female nature was almost broken down.

Where could she lean for the close sympathy befitting such grief? Her father was not here, and she had none but her husband—the husband of less than a week, but still the nearest to her need.

On him she allowed herself to rest that solemn evening after her mother's body had sought the ground. He was well again, for the time.

For the first time she was alone with him, and, as the shadows narrowed their chamber, and they sat with no other light than a little wood smouldering in the grate, he came to her and began to talk of childhood and his own mother, of the little sorrows his mother had shared with him, of domestic disagreements and happy love-making anew; how men feel when the partner of life is taken away, and children know not the meaning of Death, that has done so awful a thing upon the inoffensive one; but above all is shining, Meshach said, the star of motherhood, faintly lighting our way, mellowing our souls, and basking on the waters.

As he continued, and she could not see him, but only hear the plaintiveness of his voice, it became comfortable to hear him speak, and she grew more passive, a sense of resignation fell upon her heart, and of gratitude to him that could divine her loss so touchingly; and, like a child, she rested upon his side, upon his knee, and in his arms at last. Not fond nor yet infatuated, but subsiding and consenting, accepting her destiny like a myriad of women that are neither oppressed nor tender, but with reluctance, yield, she passed out of grief to wifedom, like one tired and in a dream.

Visits of consolation were made by a few old friends for a day or two succeeding. The Rev. Henry Lyon Davis, late president of the college at Annapolis, came, bringing his handsome boy of twelve, Master Harry Winter Davis. The attorney-general of Maryland, Mr. Roger Taney, came with Mr. George Brown, the banker. Commodore Decatur's widow sent a mourning token, and the Honorable William Wirt brought Mr. Robert Smith, once the secretary of state at Washington.

These and others, looking at Meshach Milburn a little oddly, found him, on acquaintance, a man of sense; but the McLanes who called were either supercilious or studiously avoided the groom.

An invitation came from Arlington House to Vesta, to bring Mr. Milburn there; and, as they proceeded out the Washington road in a private carriage, they observed Mr. Ross Winans's friction-wheel car, with nearly forty people in it, making its trial trip behind a horse at a gallop. At the Relay House, where the horses on the railroad were changed, Milburn remarked, gazing up the Patapsco valley:

"My wife, we are here at the birth of this little iron highway. If our vision was great enough, we might see the mighty things that may happen upon it: servile insurrection, sectional war, great armies riding to great battles, thousands of emigrants drawn to the West. We shall die, but generations after us this road will grow and continue, like a vein of iron, whose length and uses no man can measure."

The road to Washington was in places good, and often turned in among the pines. At Riverdale they saw the deer of Mr. George Calvert, a descendant of one of the Lords Baltimore, browsing in his park, and his great four-in-hand carriage was going in the lodge-gates from a state visit to the Custises. Passing direct to Georgetown from Bladensburg, they encountered General Jackson, taking his evening ride on horseback, and saw the chasm of the new canal being dug along the Potomac, and then, crossing Mason's ferry, they were set down at Arlington House an hour after dark.

The hospitable, harmless proprietor welcomed them into the huge edifice, half temple, half barn, among his elaborate daubs of pictures, and furniture and relics of Custis and Washingtonian times. He was nearly fifty years of age, of Indian features, but rather weak face, like one whose only substantiality was in his ancestors, and Vesta, placing him beside her husband, reflected that a similar inbreeding had produced a similarity in the two men, both of a sallow and bilious attenuation; but Milburn, beside her kinsman Custis, was like a bold wolf beside a vacant-visaged sheep.

Yet these men liked each other immediately, Milburn's intelligence and money, and real reverence for the great man who had adopted Mr. Custis, giving him admittance to the latter's fancy.

They strolled through those beautiful woods, one day to become a grove of sepulture for an army of dead, while Vesta, in the dwelling, talked with her cousins, and with the graceful Lieutenant Lee, who was courting Mary Custis.

It was a happy domestic life, and in the host's veins ran the blood of the Calverts, though not of the legitimate line.

It was suggested to go to the Capitol, and Mr. Milburn, growing daily better in the hill region, went also, and wore his steeple hat, greatly to the edification of Mr. Custis, who revelled in such antiquities. Vesta heard the ladies whispering, when they returned, that a parcel of boys and negroes had followed the hat, laughing and jeering, and had finally driven the party to their carriage. This, and her husband's impatience to return to his business, hastened their departure from Arlington.

They took the steamer down the Potomac, and, as they came off the mouth of St. Mary's River, Milburn donned his Raleigh's hat again, and stood on deck, looking at the lights about the old Priest's House, where the capital of Lord Baltimore lay, a naked plain and a few starveling mementoes, within the bight of a sandy point that faced the archipelago of the Eastern Shore.

"My hat," said Milburn to himself, "is old as yonder town, and better preserved. The Calverts and Milburns have married into Mrs. Washington's kin. Does my wife love me?"



CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE ORDEAL.

When Levin Dennis awoke in the bottom of the old wagon it was being rapidly driven, and Van Dorn's voice from the driver's seat was heard to say, without its usual lisp and Spanish interjection:

"Whitecar, is your brother at Dover sure of his game?"

"Cock sure, Cap'n. Got 'em tree'd! Best domestic stock in the town thar, an' the purtiest yaller gals: I know that suits you, Cap'n!"

"Have they arms?"

"Not a trigger. We trap 'em at one of their 'festibals.' No, sir, niggers won't scrimmage."

"We assemble at Devil Jim Clark's," said Van Dorn, and passed by with a crack of his whip.

Levin, whom some friendly hand had wrapped in a bearskin coat—he had seen one like it upon Van Dorn—next heard the slaver speak to another party he had overtaken:

"Melson?"

"Ay yi!"

"Milman?"

"Ah! boy."

"You get your orders at Devil Jim Clark's!"

The stars were out, yet the night was rich in large, fleecy clouds, as if heaven were hurrying onward too. Levin lay on his back, jostled by the rough wagon, but, being perfectly sober now, he was more reasoning and courageous, and his new-found love impelled him to self-preservation. He might have rolled out of the vehicle and into the woods, and at least saved himself from committing further crime, but how would he see Hulda any more—Hulda, in danger, perhaps? Thus, even to ignorance, love brings understanding, and Levin began to ask himself the cause of his own misery. He knew it was liquor, yet what made him drink if not a disposition too easily led? Even now he was under almost voluntary subjection to the bandit in the wagon, whose voice he heard blandly command again to some pair he had caught up to:

"Tindel?"

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van! Tackle 'em!"

"You are not to be in peril to-night, so keep your spirits. I expect you to look out for the cords, gags, and fastenings generally!"

"Tackle 'em, Captin; oh, tackle 'em!"

"You and Buck Ransom there—"

"Politely, Captain; politely, sir!" exclaimed an insinuating voice from a negro rider.

"Are to meet us all at Devil Jim's!"

"Tackle 'em, Captin!"

"Politely, Captain!"

As Van Dorn urged his way to the head of the line, Levin looked out silently upon the flat country of forest and a few poor farms, drained imperfectly by some ditches of the Choptank. He supposed it might be almost midnight, from the position of those brilliant constellations which shone down equally upon his mother and himself—she in her innocence and he in his anxiety—and shone, also, perhaps, upon his poor father's grave in isle or ocean.

Within an hour blood was to be shed, no doubt, and rapine done, and he knew not the road to escape by nor the hole to hide in. Yet in that hour he had to make his choice,—to fight for liberty, or go to the jail, the whipping-post, or, perhaps, the gallows.

Levin considered ruefully his vagrant past, and how little could be said in extenuation of him in a court of justice, except by his mother's faith, which was no more evidence than a negro's oath.

Once it arose in his mind to surprise Van Dorn, overcome him, cast him out in a ditch, and drive to some one of the little farmhouses and rest, till day should give him his whereabouts and remedy.

Levin was not a coward, and his muscles were hard, and his feet could cling to a smooth plank like a bird's to a bough; but his heart relented to the fierce, soft man so unsuspectingly sitting with his back to him, when Levin reflected that he must, perhaps, put an end to Van Dorn's life with his sailor's knife, if they grappled at all, and this day expiring Van Dorn had paid a debt for him to the widow whose son was next overtaken, and who cried, forwardly, without being addressed:

"Van Dorn, what you goin' to give me if I git a nigger?"

"This!" said Van Dorn, without a pause, reaching the boy a measured blow with his whip-lash on the shoulder that made him literally fall from the mule and grovel with pain.

"Discipline is what your mother failed to give you, reprobo. Manners I shall teach you. Fall in the rear!"

Owen Daw crawled desperately on his mule and obeyed without parley, but his audacity soon recovered enough to force his animal up to the wagon tail and open whispered communications with Levin there.

Nothing had passed them for hours that Levin had seen, when suddenly a horseman at a rapid lope stopped the wagon, and a hoarse negro voice muttered:

"How de do, now? See me! see me!"

"Derrick Molleston?" spoke Van Dorn.

"See me! see me!"

"Get down and ride with me. Levin, are you awake?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Take this man's horse and ride him. John Sorden is ahead. It will stretch your chilled limbs."

"May I go with him?" asked Owen Daw, in his Celtic accent, quite cringing now.

"Not unless he wants you."

"Come, then," Levin obligingly said.

While the two youths were still lingering by the wagon they heard these words:

"Have you arranged everything with Whitecar and Devil Jim?"

"See me! see me!"—apparently meaning, "Rely upon me."

"Is Greenley ready to make the diversion if any attack be made upon us?"

"See me! see me! His gallus is up and he'd burn de world."

"This Lawyer Clayton?"

"See me! see me! He gives a big party, Aunt Braner tole me. A judge is dar from Prencess Anne, an' liquor a-plenty. See me! see me!"

"The white people absolutely gone from Cowgill House?"

"See me! It's nigh half a mile outen de town. Dar's forty tousand dollars, if dar's a cent, at dat festibal: gals more'n half white, men dat can read an' preach: de cream of Kent County. See me! see me!"

"And not a suspicion of our coming?"

"See me! O see me!" hoarsely said the negro; "innercent as de unborn. To-night's deir las' night!"

Levin trembled as these merciless words reached his ears, but Owen Daw seemed to forget his affront at the tidings, and chuckled to Levin as they trotted away:

"Bet you I git a better nigger nor you!"

"Oh, shame, Owen Daw! Your mother was saved to-day from bein' turned out of doors by my pity. Think of robbin' these niggers of their freedom! What have they done?"

"Been niggers!" exclaimed Owen Daw. "That's enough!"

"What will you do, Owen, to help your poor mother?"

"Wait till I git big enough, bedad, an' kill ole Jake Cannon for this day's work."

As they rode on they came to the man called Sorden, riding as the guide to the invading column, a person of more genteel address than any beneath Van Dorn, and young, pliable, and frolicking.

"My skin!" he said. "Now, boys, Van Dorn oughtn't had to brung you. You're too sniptious for this rough work. I love the Captain better than I ever loved A male, but he oughtn't to spile boys."

"Van Dorn told me to come," Owen Daw cried. "I'm big enough to buck a nigger."

"I love him better than I ever loved A male," said Sorden, apologetically. "Who is t'other young offender?"

"I'm a stranger to your parts," Levin replied. "Mrs. Cannon made me come. I didn't want to."

"Are you afear'd?"

"Yes," Levin said.

"Well, I love the Captain better than I ever loved A male. But boys is boys, and I hate to see 'em spiled. If you was nigger boys I wouldn't keer a cent; but white's my color, and I don't want to trade in it."

They halted at a small, sharp-gabled brick house, of one story and a kitchen and garret, at the left of the road, to which the corner of a piece of oak and hickory woods came up shelteringly, while in the rear several small barns and cribs enclosed the triangle of a field. A door in the middle, towards Maryland, seemed very high-silled, and low grated windows were at the cellar on each side of the steps.

The place had a suspicious appearance, and a pack of hounds in full cry rushed from the kitchen, and, while in the act of leaping the stile and palings, were arrested almost in mid air by a chuffy voice crying from within:

"Hya! Down! Spitch!"

The whole pack meekly sneaked back to the house, whining low, and a few blows of a switch and short howls within completed the excitement.

"What place is this?" asked Owen Daw.

"Devil Jim Clark's," said Sorden.

The dwelling stood about forty yards back from the road, drawing nearly into the cover of the woods, and its little yard was made cavernous by thick-planted paper-mulberry and maple trees, while a line of cherry-trees and an old pole-well rose along the road and hedge. As they rode to the rear of the house a little dormer window, like a snail, crawled low along the roof, and a light was shining from it.

"Devil Jim's business-office," nodded Sorden.

"What's his business?" asked Levin, freshly.

"Niggers. He keeps 'em up thar between the garret and the roof—sometimes in the cellar."

"Does he want a business-office for that?"

"He's a contractor on the canawl, too, Jim is—raises race-horses, farms it, gambles a little, but nigger-runnin' is his best game. My skin! Yer comes Captain Van Dorn. I love him as I never loved A male."

"Van Dorn," spoke a voice from the house, "remember my family is particular. Your men must go to the barn. Come in!"

"Spiced brandy at the barn!"—a quiet remark from somewhere—was sufficient to lead the herd away, and, giving the order to "water and fodder," Van Dorn passed into the kitchen, thence through a bedroom to the chief room of the house, and up a small winding-stair to a scrap of hallway or corridor hardly two feet wide.

The man who led pointed to a trap above one end of this hall, and exclaimed, "Niggers there! family yonder!"—the last reference to a door closing the little passage.

He then opened a wicket at the side of the hall, admitting Van Dorn to an exceedingly small closet or garret room, barely large enough for the men to sit, and lighted by a lamp in the little dormer window seen from below.

"Drink!" said the man, uncorking a bottle of champagne; "I had it ready for you."

He poured the foaming wine and set the bottle on a sort of secretary or desk, and then looked anxiety and avarice together out of his liquid black eyes and broad, heavy face.

"Buena suerte, senor!" Van Dorn lisped, as they drank together.

"Hya! spitch!" nervously muttered Clark, cutting his own top-boots with a dog-whip. "I wish I was out of the business: the risk is too great. My wife is religious—praying, mebbe, now, in there. My daughters is at the seminaries, spendin' money like the Canawl Company on the lawyers. Nothin' pays like nigger-stealin', but it's beneath you and me, Van Dorn."

"A la verdad! This is my last incursion, Don Clark. Pleasure has kept me poor for life. To-day I did a little sacrifice, and it grows upon me."

"If they should ketch me and set me in the pillory, Van Dorn, for what you do to-night, hya! spitch!"—he slashed his knees—"it would break Mrs. Clark's heart."

"I want this money to-night," said Van Dorn, "to make two young people happy. They shall take my portion, and take me with them out of the plains of Puckem."

"Oh, it is nervous business"—Clark's eyes of rich jelly made the pallor on his large face like a winding-sheet—"hya! spitch! The Quakers are a-watchin' me. Ole Zekiel Jinkins over yer, ole Warner Mifflin down to the mill, these durned Hunns at the Wildcat—they look me through every time they ketch me on the road. But the canawl contract don't pay like niggers; my folks must hold their heads up in the world; Sam Ogg won't let me keep out of temptation."

"Do you fear me, Devil Jim?"

"Hya! spitch! No. If all in the trade was like you, I could sleep in trust. If you go out of it, so will I."

"Then to-night, penitente! we make our few thousand and quit. Give up your cards and I my doncellitas, and we can at least live."

They shook hands and drank another glass, and then Van Dorn said:

"Send up to me, hermano! the lad who will reply to the name of Levin. With him I would speak while you give the directions! Poor coward!" Van Dorn said, after his host had descended the stairs, "he can never be less than a thief with that irksomeness under such fair competence."

At that moment a beautiful maid or woman, in her white night-robe, stood in the little doorway, with eyes so like the richness of his just gone that it must have been his daughter. She fled as she recognized a stranger, and Van Dorn pursued till a door was closed in his face.

"Poor fool!" he said, sinking into his chair again; "I will never be more honest than any woman can make me!"

As Levin entered the little hallway Van Dorn smiled:

"Here is a glass of real wine to inspire you, junco."

"No, Captain. I would rather die than drink it."

"Do you repent coming with me?"

"Oh, bitterly, Captain. I don't want to steal poor, helpless people if they is black."

"Now, listen, lad!"—Van Dorn's face ceased to blush and the coarse look came into his blue eyes—"this night's excursion is for your profit. I like your gentle inclination for me, and the good acts you have solicited from me, and the confidence you have shown me as to your love for pretty Hulda. Join me in this work willingly, and I will give her, for your marriage settlement, all my share."

"Never," Levin exclaimed.

Van Dorn drew his knife and rose to his feet.

"Levin," he lisped, "I promised Patty Cannon that I would bring you back spotted with crime or dead. Now choose which it shall be."

"To die, then," cried Levin, with one hand drawing the long, silken hair from his eyes and with the other drawing his own knife; "but I will fight for my life."

Van Dorn seized Levin's wrist in a vise-like grip, but, as he did so, threw his own knife upon the floor.

"Oh! huerfano, waif," Van Dorn murmured, while his blush returned, "take heed thou ever sayest 'No' with courage like that, when cowardice or weak acquiescence would extort thy 'Yes.' This moment, if thou hadst consented, thy heart would be on my knife, young Levin!"

He drew the knife from Levin's hand and put it in his ragged coat again, and set the boy on his knee as if he had been a little child.

"Oh, God be thanked I did not kill you, sir," sobbed Levin, his tears quickly following his courage; "twice I have thought of doin' it to-day."

"I never would have put you to that test, my poor lad, but that I saw your conscience at work all this day under the stimulation of virtuous love. Think nothing of me. Build your own character upon some good example, and, sweet as life is, fight for it on the very frontiers of your character. Die young, but surrender only when you are old."

"Captain," Levin said, "how kin I git character? My father is dead. Everybody twists me around his fingers."

"Then think of some plain, strong, faithful man you may know and refer every act of your character to him. Ask yourself what he would do in your predicament, then go and do the same."

"I do know such a man," Levin said, in another moment; "It is Jimmy Phoebus, my poor, beautiful mother's beau."

"El rayo ha caido!" Van Dorn spoke, low and calm; "yes, Levin, any man worthy of your mother will do."

"Captain, turn back with me! Is it too late?"

"Too late these many years, young senor. I shall lead the war on Africa to-night again at Cowgill House."

He rose and finished the wine.

"Clark shall give you a horse, Levin. I present it to you. Ride on with Sorden at the lead, and a mile from here, at Camden town, take your own way. Good-night!"

Taking a single look at the miserable band of whites and blacks collected in the barn, and revealed by a lantern's light in the excitement of drink and avarice, or the familiarity of fear and vice—some inspecting gags of corn-cob and bucks of hickory, others trimming clubs of blackjack with the roots attached; others loading their horse-pistols and greasing the dagger-slides thereon; some whetting their hog-killing knives upon harness, others cutting rope and cord into the lengths to bind men's feet—Levin was set on the loping horse he had been already riding, by Clark, the host, and soon met Sorden on the road.

"Where is Van Dorn?" Sorden asked; "I love him as I never loved A male."

"He sends me to Camden of an errand," Levin answered; "is it far?"

"About a mile. Three miles, then, to Dover. My skin! how fresh your critter is; ain't it Dirck Molleston's? I thought so. Then he'll be wantin' to turn in at Cooper's Corners."

"Does Derrick live there?"

"Yes. That's whar he holds the Forks of both roads from below, and watches the law in Dover. I hope Van Dorn will git away with the loot and not git ketched, fur I love him as I never loved A male."

Levin's horse, at his easy gait, soon left Sorden far behind, and the strange events of the night, and his wonder what to do next, kept Levin's brain whirling till he saw the form of a few houses rise among the trees, and a line of arborage indicate a main road from north to south. The scent as of cold, wide waters and marshes filled the night.

"Here is Camden," Levin thought; "where shall I go? If I turn south I shall get no bed nor food all night, and be picked up in the mornin' fur a kidnapper. I can't go back. The big river or the ocean, I reckon, is before me. What would Jimmy Phoebus do?"

He held the animal in as he asked this question, and paused at the crossing of the great State road.

The idea slowly spread upon his whole existence that James Phoebus would, in Levin's place, ride instantly to Dover and give the alarm.

Levin tried to construct Phoebus in a mood to give some other advice, but, as the resolute pungy captain's form seemed to bestride the young man's mind, it rose more and more stalwart, and appeared to lead towards Dover, where so many poor souls, in the joys of intercourse and freedom, were like little birds unconscious of the hawks above them, and no man in the world but Levin Dennis could save them from death or bondage.

Would James Phoebus, with his lion nature, ever hesitate in the duty of a citizen and a Christian under such circumstances, or forgive another man for withholding information that might be life and liberty and mercy?

Yet there was Van Dorn to be betrayed. What would Van Dorn do in Levin's place?

The words of Van Dorn, not a quarter of an hour old, spoke aloud in Levin's echoing consciousness: "Think nothing of me. Refer every act to some faithful man and go and do the same!"

Levin looked up, and the very clouds, now swollen dark in spite of starshine, seemed hurrying on Dover. The night-birds were crying "Mercy! mercy!" the lizards and tree-frogs seemed to cross each other's voices, piping "Time! time! time!"

"Huldy!" Levin whispered, and let the reins fall loose, and his animal darted through Camden town to the north.

He had gone by the small frame houses, the Quaker meeting, the stores, the outskirt residences, when suddenly his horse turned out to pass a large, dark object in the road ahead, and a horseman rode right across Levin's course, forcing his animal back on its haunches.

"High doings, friend!" a man's voice raspingly spoke; "I'm concerned for thee!"

"Git out of my way or I'll stab you!" Levin cried, between his new ardor to do his duty and the idea that he had already been intercepted by Patty Cannon's band.

"Ha, friend! I'm less concerned for myself than thee. Thou wilt not stab a citizen of Camden town at his own door?"

"For Heaven's sake, let me go, then!" Levin pleaded. "The kidnappers is coming to Dover in a few minutes. I want to tell Lawyer Clayton!"

Immediately the other person, a tall, lean man, wheeled and dashed after the dark object ahead, which Levin, following also hard, found to be a large covered wagon—something between the dearborn or farmer's and the family carriage.

"Bill," the Quaker called to the driver, "spare not thy whip till Dover be well past. Here is one who says kidnappers are raiding even the capital of Delaware. I'm concerned for thee!"

The driver began to whip his horses into a gallop, and cries, as of several persons, came out of the close-curtained vehicle.

"What's in there?" Levin asked the Quaker, who had rejoined him; "niggers?"

"No, friend," the Quaker crisply answered, "only Christians."

They crossed a mill-stream, and soon afterwards a smaller run, without speaking, and came to a little log-and-frame cabin in a fork of the road, where Levin's horse tried to run in.

"Ha, friend! Is it not Derrick Molleston's loper thee has—the same that he gets from Devil Jim Clark? What art thou, then? I feel concerned for thee."

"A Christian, too, I hope," answered Levin, forcing his nag up the road.

"Then thee is better than a youth in this dwelling we next pass," the Quaker said, pointing to a brick house on the left; "for there lived a judge whose son bucked a poor negro fiddler in his father's cellar, and delivered him to Derrick Molleston to be sold in slavery. I hear the poor man tells it in his distant house of bondage."

"What's this?" Levin inquired, seeing a strange structure of beams on a cape or swell to the right, in sight of the dark forms of a town on the next crest beyond.

"A gallows," said the Quaker, "on which a horse-thief will be hanged to-morrow. To steal a horse is death; to steal a fellow-man is nothing."

As he spoke, the mysterious carriage turned down a cross street of Dover and stole into the obscurity of the town.

"Ha! ha!" exclaimed the Quaker; "if Joe Johnson had not stopped to feed at Devil Jim's, he might have overtaken my brother's wagon full of escaping slaves. I tell thee, friend, because I'm scarce concerned for thee now."



CHAPTER XXXV.

COWGILL HOUSE.

Long after midnight, Dover was in bed, except at one large house on the Capitol green, where light shone through the chinks and cracks of curtains and shutters, and some watch-dog, perhaps, ran along curiously to see why.

The stars and clouds in the somewhat troubled sky looked down through the leafless trees upon the pretty town and St. Jones's Creek circling past it, and hardly noticed a long band of creeping men and animals steal up from the Meeting House branch, past the tannery and the academy, and plunge into the back streets of the place, avoiding the public square.

One file turned down to the creek and crossed it, to return farther above, cutting off all escape by the northern road, while a second file slipped silently through and around the compact little hamlet and waited for the other to arrive, when both encompassed an old brick dwelling standing back from the roadside in a green and venerable yard, nearly half a mile from the settled parts of Dover.

This house was brilliantly lighted, and the rose-bushes and shade trees were all defined as they stood above the swells of green verdure and the ornamental paths and flower-beds.

One majestic tulip-tree extended its long branches nearly to the portal of the quaint dwelling, and a luxuriant growth of ivy, starting between the cellar windows, clambered to the corniced carpentry of the eaves, and made almost solid panels of vine of the spaces between the four large, keystoned windows in two stories, which stood to the right of the broad, dumpy door.

This door, at the top of a flight of steps, was placed so near the gable angle of the house that it gave the impression of but one wing of a mansion originally designed to be twice its length and size.

Between this gable—which faced the road, and had four lines of windows in it, besides a basement row—and the back or town door, as described, was one squarish, roomy window, out of relation to all the rest, and perhaps twelve feet above the ground. This, as might be guessed, was on the landing of the stairs within; for the great door and front of the residence being at the opposite side, the whole of the space at the townward gable, to the width of seventeen feet, was a noble hall about forty feet long, lofty, and with pilasters in architectural style, and lighted by two great windows in the gable and the square window on the stairway.

The stairway itself was a beautiful piece of work and proportion, rising from the floor in ten railed steps to the landing at the square window, where a space several feet square commanded both the great front door and the windows in the gable, and also the yard behind; thence, at right angles, the flight of steps rose along the back wall to a second landing over the dumpy back-door, and, by a third leap, returned at right angles, to the floor above, making what is called the well of the stairway to be exceedingly spacious, and it opened to the garret floor.

No doubt this cool, great hall was designed to be the centre of a large mansion, yet it had lost nothing in agreeableness by becoming, instead, the largest room in the house, receiving abundant daylight, and it was large enough for either a feast or public worship, and such was its frequent use.

Built by a tyrannical, eccentric man at the beginning of the century, it had passed through several families until a Quaker named Cowgill, who afterwards became a Methodist, and who held no slaves and was kind to black people, made it his property, and superintended a tannery and mill within sight of it.

He was frequently absent for weeks, especially in the bilious autumn season, and allowed his domestics to assemble their friends and the general race, at odd times, in the great hallway, for such rational enjoyments as they might select.

In truth, the owner of the house desired it to get a more cheerful reputation; for the negroes, in particular, considered it haunted.

The first owner, it was said, had amused himself in the great hall-room by making his own children stand on their toes, switching their feet with a whip when they dropped upon their soles from pain or fatigue; and his own son finally shot at him through the great northern door with a rifle or pistol, leaving the mark to this day, to be seen by a small panel set in the original pine. The third owner, a lawyer, often entertained travelling clergymen here; and, on one occasion, the eccentric Reverend Lorenzo Dow met on the stairs a stranger and bowed to him, and afterwards frightened the host's family by telling it, since they were not aware of any stranger in the house. The room over the great door had always been considered the haunt of peculiar people, who molested nobody living, but appeared there in some quiet avocation, and vanished when pressed upon.

This main door itself had a church-like character, and was battened or built in half, so that the upper part could be thrown open like a window, and yet the lock on this upper part was a foot and a half long, and the key weighed a pound.

This ponderous door, in elaborate carpentry, opened upon a flight of steps and on a flower-yard surrounded by elms, firs, and Paulownia trees, the latter of a beany odor and nature. A lower servants' part of the dwelling, in two stories, stretched to the fields, and had a veranda-covered rear.

Van Dorn called to a negro:

"Buck Ransom!"

"Politely, Captain," the negro's insinuating voice answered.

"Go to the front door and knock. As you enter, see that it is clear to fly open. Then, as you pass along the hall, throw the windows up."

"Politely, Captain;" the negro bowed and departed.

"Owen Daw!"

"Yer honor!"

"Climb into the big tulip-tree softly and take this musket I shall reach you. Train it on the staircase window, and fire only if you see resistance there."

The boy went up the tree with all his vicious instincts full of fight.

"Melson!"

"Ay yi!"

"Milman!"

"Ah! boy."

"Get yourselves beneath the two large windows on the hall and serve as mounting-blocks to Sorden's party. I shall storm the main door. As we enter there, Sorden, order your men right over Melson and Milman into the windows Ransom has lifted."

"I love him," muttered Sorden, admiringly, "as I never loved A male," and collected his party.

"Whitecar, you and your brother hold the back door with your staves. If it is forced, Miles Tindel—"

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

"Will throw his red-pepper dust into the eyes of any that come out."

"Oh, tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

"Derrick Molleston!"

"See me, O see me!" the powerful negro muttered.