"Take Herron and Vincent, and two more, and guard the kitchen and the front of the main dwelling. Knock any creature stiff, except—ayme! ay!—the young damsels, whose fears will soon trip them to the ground."

"See me, see me!" the negro hoarsely said.

"As we enter the door, I shall cry, 'Patty Cannon has come!' Then spring in the windows and beat opposition down. Relampaguea! Ransom is slow."

The knocker on the great door sounded, and it sprang open and quickly slammed again, and a stifled, strange sound followed, as of a scuffle.

Van Dorn, agile as a panther, sprang on Milman's back and looked into a window in the gable, drawing his face away, so as to be unseen in the night.

The bright interior was full of people, sitting back against the wainscoting, as if listening to a sermon, while down the middle of the stately hall stretched a table lighted by whale-oil lamps and many little candles, and filled with the remnants of a feast. The stairway in the corner Van Dorn could not see, and there the dusky audience was all facing, as if towards the preacher. There seemed a something out of the common in the kind of attention the inmates were paying, but Van Dorn's eyes were absorbed in the sight of several drooping and yet almost startled dove-eyed quadroon maids, and he only noticed that the spy, Ransom, could not be seen.

"Sorden," Van Dorn said, slipping down, "can Ransom have betrayed us? Chis! they all look as if a death-warrant was being read."

"My skin! No, Captain. Air they all there?"

"All," said Van Dorn; "I see thirty thousand dollars of flesh in sight."

"And niggers won't scrimmage nohow," spoke Whitecar. "Let's beat 'em mos' to death."

"Come on then," said Van Dorn, softly; "if the windows are not lifted, break them in."

He twisted, by main strength, a panel out of the palings near the house, and led the way to the great front door. A dozen desperate hands seized the heavy panel and ran with it. The door flew open, but at that moment every light in Cowgill House went out.

"Dar's ghosts in dar," the hoarse voice of Derrick Molleston was heard to say, and the negro element stopped and shrank.

"Tindel, your torch!" Van Dorn exclaimed, and, after a moment's delay—the old house and shady yard meantime illumined by lightning, and sounds of thunder rolling in the sky—a blazing pine-knot, all prepared, was procured, and Van Dorn, holding it in his left hand, and with nothing but his rude whip in his right, bounded in the door, shouting:

"Patty Cannon has come!"

At that dreaded name there were a few suppressed shrieks, and the great windows at the gable side fell inwards with a crash as the kidnappers came pouring over.

Van Dorn's quick eye took in the situation as he waved his torch, and it lighted ceiling and pilaster, the close-fastened doors on the left and the great stairway-well beyond, filled with black forms in the attitude of defence.

"Patty Cannon has come!" he shouted again; "follow me!"

An instant only brought him to the base of the staircase, and the lightning flashing in the gaping windows and fallen door revealed him to his followers, with his yellow hair waving, and his long, silken mustache like golden flame.

A mighty yell rose from the emboldened gang as they formed behind him, with bludgeons and iron knuckles, billies and slings, and whatever would disable but fail to kill.

Van Dorn, far ahead, made three murderous slashes of his whip across the human objects above, and, with a toss of that formidable weapon, clubbed it and darted on.

At the moment loud explosions and smoke and cries filled the echoing place, as a volley of firearms burst from the landing, sweeping the line of the windows and raking the hall. The band on the floor below stopped, and some were down, groaning and cursing.

"They're armed; it's treachery," a voice, in panic, cried, and the cowardly assailants ran to places of refuge, some crawling out at the portal, some dropping from the windows, and others getting behind the stairway, out of fire, and seeking desperately to draw the bolts of the smaller door there.

"Patty Cannon has come!" Van Dorn repeated, throwing himself into the body of the defenders, who, terrified at his bravery, began to retreat upward around the angles of the stairs.

One man, however, did not retreat, neither did he strike, but wrapped Van Dorn around the body in a pair of long and powerful arms, and lifted him from the landing by main strength, saying:

"High doings, friend! I'm concerned for thee."

Van Dorn felt at the grip that he was overcome. He tried to reach for his knife, but his arms were enclosed in the unknown stranger's, who, having seized him from behind, sought to push him through the square window on the landing into the grass yard below, where the rain was falling and the lightning making brilliant play among the herbs and ferns.

As the kidnapper prepared himself to fall, with all his joints and muscles relaxed, the boy, Owen Daw, lying bloodthirstily along the limb of the old tulip-tree, aimed his musket, according to Van Dorn's instructions, at the forms contending there, and greedily pulled the trigger.

The Quaker's arms, as they enclosed Van Dorn, presented, upon the cuff of his coat, a large steel or metal button, and the ball from the tree, striking this, glanced, and entered Van Dorn's throat.

"Ayme Guay!" Van Dorn muttered, and was thrown out of the window to the earth, all limp and huddled together, till John Sorden bore him off, muttering,

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The desperate party beneath the stairs at last broke open the back door there and rushed forth, only to receive handfuls of red pepper dust thrown by Miles Tindel, as he cried,

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

They screamed with anguish, and rolled in the wet grass, and yet, with fears stronger than pain, sought the road in blindness, and some way to leave the town.

Young Owen O'Day, or Daw, crept down the tree, and, seeing Van Dorn in Sorden's arms at the wagon, contemptuously said, as he mounted his mule and vanished:

"I reckon he'll never discipline me no mo'."

Derrick Molleston, regretting the loss of his loping horse, bore out to the wagon an object he had found striving to escape from the veranda at the kitchen side, though with a gag in his mouth, and a skewer between his elbows and his back.

"See me, see me!" the negro kidnapper spoke, hoarsely. "He's mine an' Devil Jim Clark's. I tuk him."

"Why, it's Buck Ransom," Sorden said.

"An' I'm gwyn to sell him, too," the negro muttered, seizing the reins. "You see me now! Maybe he cheated us. Any way, he's tuk."

The old wagon started at a run through the driving rain, the black victim lying helpless on his back, and Van Dorn bleeding in Sorden's arms, who continued to moan,

"I loved him as I never loved A male!"

Van Dorn made several efforts to talk, and often coughed painfully, and finally, as they reached a lane gate, he articulated:'

"The Chancellor's?"

"Yes, dis is it," Derrick Molleston said. "See me, Cap'n Van. I's all heah."

As they advanced up a shady lane, fire from somewhere began to make a certain illumination in spite of the loud storm.

"It's Bill Greenley. He's set de jail afire," the negro exclaimed. "See me, O see me!"

The conflagration gave a vapory red light to a secluded dwelling they now approached, upon a bowery lawn, and Sorden saw a woman of a severe aspect looking out of a window at the fire.

"What is the meaning of this trespass so late at night?" she called. "Are you robbers? My aged husband is asleep."

"Madam," answered Sorden, "here is the husband of Mrs. Patty Cannon. She was your brother's mother-in-law. I love this man as I never loved A male. He is wounded, and we want him taken in till he can have a doctor."

"Take him to the jail, then, if that is not it burning yonder," the woman exclaimed, scornfully. "Shall I make the home of the Chancellor of Delaware a hospital for Patty Cannon's men as a reward for her sending my brother to the gallows?"

She closed the window and the blind, and left them alone in the storm.

"Drive, Derrick, to your den at Cooper's Corners, quick, then," Sorden said.

As they left the lane a flash of lightning, so near, so white, that they seemed to be within the volume and crater of it, enveloped the wagon. One horse sank down on his haunches, and the other reared back and tore from his harness, while the wagon was overset.

The negro picked up his helpless fellow-African and lifted him on his back, starting off in mingled avarice and terror, and saying,

"Derrick's gwyn home, sho'. See me, see me!"

Van Dorn put his finger at his throat, where blood was all the while trickling, and, with a gentle cough, extorted the sounds:

"Leave me—under a bush—to—die."

"No," cried Sorden, raising Van Dorn also upon his back; "I love him as I never loved A male."

The fire of the burning jail lighted their return into the outskirts of Dover and to the gallows' hill, where stood the scaffold, split with the lightning from cross-beam to the death-trap. As they halted opposite it to rest, a horse and rider came stumbling past, and Molleston, dropping his burden, shouted:

"Bill Greenley, dat's our hoss. We want it."

"His is the hoss that's on him," cried the escaped horse-thief, looking scornfully up at his own gallows as he lashed his blinded animal along in the rain.

"Cheer up, Captain Van," John Sorden said, soaked through with the rain; "'t'ain't fur now to Cooper's Corners."



CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO WHIGS.

"Goy! Look at the trees, friend Custis," said John M. Clayton, standing before his office as the rising sun innocently struck the tree-tops in the public square of Dover.

Judge Custis, sitting at an upper window, observed that many noble elms and locusts had been riven by lightning, or torn by wind and wind-driven floods of rain.

"What a night!" Custis exclaimed; "the jail burned, the lightning appalling, and I thought I heard firearms, too."

Judge Custis heard Clayton say, as he entered the room:

"So ole Derrick Molleston, Aunt Braner, asked you about my dinner, did he? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the black people licked the kidnappers at Cowgill House?"

"Dat dey did, praise de Lord!" ejaculated Aunt Braner, fervently.

Clayton turned to a young man at the table, now dressed in a good clean suit of clothes, and said, as the old cook left the room:

"Now, friend Dennis, tell your tale. Goy!"

The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:

"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last night. Maybe they's gone before this. My boat was hired to take 'em off, and I had to come along, but I run away from the band and give warnin' last night to Mr. Clayton yer."

Before the Judge could reply, Clayton exclaimed,

"Now, Brother Custis, permit me now! Let my noble old constituent and fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"

"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House—where I am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes the name among them of 'Kind Parke'—I found several of our free Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William Parke, contrary to law, has been selling thee brandy out of an eggshell, as if he knew not the contents, I shall pay him to repeat the vile enticement quickly, for ye who are of the world must fight this night.'"

"Goy!" said Clayton, warming up; "Quakers will set other people on, won't they? Goy!"

"Other gunpowder arms were there procured, and we barricaded Cowgill House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns, and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical defensive position—is that the vain term?—to send a volley out the main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of the black boys gagged him. Then the attack was made, and, at my order, all the lights were put out."

"Oh, Jedge," Levin Dennis broke in, "it was short and dreadful! Captain Van Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the niggers half-way up fired over his head and shot mos' everything down. The Quaker man yer then pinioned the captain an' dropped him, wounded, out of the high window. I pity Van Dorn, but he says that he's in a bad business. I hope he ain't dead."

"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I've heard of such a dare-devil, but he has never pestered Princess Anne."

"I ran and hid in the deep eaves of the garret story," Levin continued, "which is built in like closets, and the wasps there, coming in to suck the blossoms on the vines that has growed up through the eaves from outside, flew around in the dark among the yaller gals that was a-hidin' and a-prayin', and never feelin' the wasps sting em', thinkin' about them kidnappers. I reckon, gen'lemen, the kidnappers will never come to Dover no more."

"Two things surprise me," Clayton said; "that Joe Johnson would venture to raid Dover itself after the licking I got him; and that free darkeys could make such a defence."

"Ah! John Clayton," spoke Jonathan Hunn, "there was a white witness there, to affirm that they only defended their lives."

"It was Captain Van Dorn that raided Dover," Levin spoke; "Joe Johnson is a coward."

"Judge Custis," said Mr. Clayton, "you and I can save this peninsula, at least, from the sectional excitements that are coming. You must surrender to Delaware old Patty Cannon and her household. She now lives on your side of the line. Come over to the Governor's office with me, and I will get a requisition for her on the business of last night. Young Dennis here knows the band; friend Hunn saw the attack."

Judge Custis's face grew suddenly troubled.

"Clayton," he said, "I would rather not appear in this matter. Indeed, you must excuse me."

"What!" said Clayton; "hesitate to do a little thing like this, after the free opinions you have expressed?"

There was a long, awkward pause. The Quaker arose, and, looking well at Judge Custis, said:

"None but Almighty God knows the secrets of a slave-holder's mind. No son of Adam is fit to be absolute over any human creature."

"Amen!" Judge Custis said, meekly.

* * * * *

The news from Princess Anne confirmed the loss of Vesta Custis's slaves. Judge Custis was told to come home and take steps for their recovery, but he was strangely apathetic. The day after the raid Levin Dennis disappeared, Clayton only saying:

"Who would have thought that soft-eyed boy was already fascinated by these kidnappers? He has taken his horse and gone back to Patty Cannon's."

The suit against the Canal Company required a great deal of research, as law-books were then scarce, and precedents for breaches of contract against corporations were not many; this form of legal life being comparatively modern in that day, like the dawn of the floral age, or before megatheriums grazed above the trees or iguanodons swam in the canals. Clayton and Custis walked and ate and lay down together, comparing knowledge and suggestions, and the litigious mind of John Randel, Junior, was rather irritating to both of them, so that, to be rid of his society in Dover, the two lawyers, meantime supplied with money by Meshach Milburn's draft, resolved to visit the canal, which was distant about thirty miles.

The three men started together in a carriage, after breakfast, on a soft yet frosty morning, such as often gives to this region a winter sparkle and mildness like the Florida climate. They passed several tidal creeks, as the Duck and the Little Duck, the Blackbird and the Apoquinimink, and, as they advanced, the barns became larger, the hedges more tasteful and trimmed like those in the French Netherlands, the leafless peach orchards stretched out like the tea-plants in China. Two or three little towns studded the roadside, the woods gave way altogether to smaller farms, and, at a steep bottom called the Fiddler's Bridge, they turned across the fields to an old four-chimneyed, galleried mansion, at the end of a long lane, and near a great stagnant pond, where John Randel, Junior, as he fully named himself on every occasion, had a fine dinner spread.

After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, to Mr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks, and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles through a mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.

The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towed them out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite a willowy island, and where an embryo "city" had been started in the marshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr. Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressive countenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fierce gestures.

"Clayton," said he, sitting on a stone lock in the evening gloaming, "I ought to have been a lawyer. Not that I am not the greatest theoretical engineer in the country, but my legal genius interposes, and I sue the villains who employ me."

Here he gave the melancholy negro a violent shaking, who took it as stolidly as a bottle of medicine shaken by the doctor.

"Yes, you sued Judge Ben Wright and he nonsuited you."

"I tell you a new axiom, Clayton," the earnest engineer cried, putting the negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs genius has to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. He deflects genius from its full expression, absorbs the virtue from it, and is a fraud."

Here he kicked the negro underneath him, who hardly protested.

"Well, then," spoke Judge Custis, "as Clayton is a man of genius, and you employ him—"

"I'm a scoundrel, of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law and right must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not been obliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I would have dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would have filled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumping water into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the country could go through, and the channel would be purged by every tide."

He stood up and put his foot on the negro, to the amusement of the boys gathering around.

"John Fitch, the engineer," said John M. Clayton, "left a curious will; it begins, 'To William Rowan, my trusty friend, I bequeath my Beaver Hat.'"

Judge Custis's countenance fell, thinking of another hat which had entered his family.

The barge on which they embarked had numerous passengers, and soon came to a small lock-town and turn-bridge, and, a few miles beyond, entered upon a serious piece of work, leaving the trough of a creek, of which the canal had previously availed itself, and cutting through the low ridge of the peninsula, which, to Judge Custis, seemed almost mountainous. He was of that patriotic opulence, just short of imagination, which rejoiced in public works, and this little canal, only fourteen miles long, was, with two or three exceptions, the only achieved work in the Union, turnpikes and bridges omitted. Built by the national government, by three of the states it connected, and by private subscription, it had involved two and a quarter million dollars of expense—no light burden when the population was, by the previous census, less than eight million whites in all the land.

Judge Custis's family troubles faded from his mind as he looked up at the deep cutting, nearly seventy feet in height of banks, with sands of yellow and green, and stains of iron and strata of marl, some of which had fallen back into the excavation and threatened the navigation again; and, when he saw a bridge, called the Buck, leap the chasm ninety feet overhead, by a span that then seemed sublimity itself, he touched Clayton and said:

"Never mind my failures! Thank God, I'm a Whig."

"Goy! there's nothing like it," said Clayton.

Not far from this point the canal passed an old church and graveyard at a bridge where Mr. Clayton said his namesake, the revolutionary Governor of Delaware, was buried. Here Randel's plain conveyance took them in, and in the moonlight they drove a few miles to Mr. Randel's estate, near the banks of a river, under a long table-mountain of barren clay and iron stain, on the farther shore.

"Here," said Randel, "is my future estate of Randalia. Here I shall see all the commerce of the canal passing by, and garnishee every vessel that pays my tolls to the Canal Company."

"Randel," asked Mr. Clayton, "what were those stakes I saw some distance back, running north and south across the fields?"

"A railroad survey."

"Who is making it?"

"They say Meshach Milburn, of Princess Anne."

"Goy!" exclaimed Clayton, "I'll beat him."

* * * * *

For two or three days the three men, still studying the canal suit, drove over a picturesque country, visiting the old manor of the Labadists and their Bohemian patron, Augustine Herman, the homestead of the late treaty minister, Bayard, and the ancient Welsh Baptist churches among the hills of the Elk and Christiana, where some of Cromwell's warriors lay. It was the favorite land of Whitefield, and in the neighborhood was an iron furnace Judge Custis examined with melancholy interest, as one of the investments of General Washington's father more than a hundred years before, when the Indians made the iron. They also went to Turkey Point, where the British army was disembarked to capture Philadelphia, and Knyphausen's division obliterated the history of Delaware by carrying her records away from Newcastle. Returning from one of these pleasant journeys, two messages from different points seared Judge Custis's eyeballs:

"Your wife died at Cambridge." "Your daughter is very ill at Wilmington."

"To Wilmington!" cried Judge Custis, staggering up. "Oh, my daughter! I have killed her."



CHAPTER XXXVII.

SPIRITS OF THE PAST.

"What do they say, William, about Jack Wonnell's being found shot dead?"

"It is generally said that he was killed by the negroes for gallantries to their color. Some talk of arresting little Roxy Custis."

"What do you say, William Tilghman?"

"I can say nothing. The night I drove Virgie to Snow Hill I drove over poor Wonnell's body. A strange negro was seen here—an enemy of your servant, Samson. The new cook at Teackle Hall thinks he fired the shot."

The young rector felt the searching look of those resinous forester's eyes staring him through.

"That shot was meant for me, William Tilghman."

"Perhaps so."

"It was the shot of a hired murderer, who mistook Wonnell's unusual hats for mine, that was not well described to him, or the description of which his drunken and excited memory did not retain."

"Mr. Milburn, please save Vesta this suspicion."

"Oh! that pure soul could not know it," Milburn continued, with a moment's gentleness; "but some of her proud kin, to whom I am less than a dog, did send the assassin. I think I guess the man."

"Do not rush to a conclusion! Remember, Vesta has suffered so much for others' errors."

"He was killed in this room, where Wonnell never came before. The wound shows the shot to have come from a point below, where nothing but Wonnell's hat, and not his features, could be seen. The mistake of bell-crown for steeple-top shows that it was a stranger's job: the poor fool died for me. Now where did the bungler who killed me by proxy come from?"

"I will be frank with you, sir. Joe Johnson, the kidnapper, was also here: Mary says so. To save Virgie from him, I helped her away."

"Now," said Milburn, "what enemy of mine delegated the kidnapper to procure a murderer?"

He waited a moment without response, and answered, in a low tone of voice, his own question:

"The man is at Johnson's Cross Roads: letters from Cambridge tell me so. It was the deceased Mrs. Custis's brother, Allan McLane."

"Again I ask you to think of Vesta and her many sacrifices!"

"I do. I have promised her that she shall never receive a cruel word from me. But I shall not spare my assassins. To them I shall be as one they have killed, and whose blood smokes, for vengeance. I possess the only warrant that can drive them from Maryland."

He laid a roll of bank-notes on the table suggestively.

"No wealth is accumulated in vain," said Meshach Milburn, his delicate nostrils distended and his fine hand pointing to the bank-bills. "Now, war on Johnson's Cross Roads!"

He crossed the old room over the store, and, opening the green chest, brought out the Entailed Hat, and took it in his hand with a grim smile.

"Here is something I thought to lay aside on my wife's account," he spoke. "Her people compel me to wear it! I thought all malice to this poor hat would be done with my social triumph here. But I am not a man to be frightened. Let them kill me, but it shall be under my ancestral brim."

"Oh! hear your mocking-bird sing again as it did: 'Vesta—Meshach—Love!' Where is the bird?"

Meshach Milburn shook his head and put the Entailed Hat upon it. "Tom left me," he said, "when they began to fire bullets at my Hat."

* * * * *

Vesta's female instinct had already found the explanation of Wonnell's death.

From the moment of knowing her husband, his fatal hat had been the shadow across her life's path. His person had never been offensive to her, and something attractive or modifying in him had led her, when a child, to offer a flower to his hat, to give it consonance with himself, that seemed to deserve less evil.

A fancied insult to his hat had made him quarrel with her father, a quarrel which involved her conquest, not by wooing, but by the treaty of war. The same hat had inspired the superstition which led her kitchen servants to leave their comfortable home, and had been the insuperable obstacle to her mother's consent to her marriage. It had caused the only bitter words that ever passed between her and her father. At last it had spilled blood, and her uncle, she well knew, from his implacable nature, had set the ruffians on, and she knew as well that her husband had found him out.

His intelligence, which would have been otherwise a matter of pride to her, became a subject of fear, involved with his hat.

Then, the loss of Virgie was hardly less severe to Vesta than her own mother's.

It was true that Roxy, pretty and loving, now poured all her devotion at her mistress's feet, but there had been something in Virgie that Roxy could never rise to—a dignity and self-reliance hardly less than a white woman's. Vesta shed bitter tears at the news of that dear comforter's flight, and on her knees, praying for the delicate young wanderer, she felt God's conviction of the sins of slavery. Alas! thousands felt the same who would not admit the conviction, and gave excuses that welded into one nation, at last, the sensitive millions who could not agree to a lesser sacrifice, but were willing to give war.

A little note from Snow Hill told Vesta that her maid had already departed, and would only write again from free soil.

So the upbraided hat was worn more often than before, and Vesta had to suffer much humiliation for it. Her husband now moved actively to organize his railroad, and visited the Maryland towns of the peninsula, taking her along, and wearing on the journey his King James tile, now swathed in mourning crape.

At Cambridge, which basked upon the waters like an English Venice, he applied the sinews of war to a listless public sentiment, and the county press began to call for Joe Johnson's expulsion, and Patty Cannon's rendition to the State of Delaware. At Easton, lying between the waters on her treasures of marl, like a pearl oyster, the people turned out to see the little man in the peaked hat, with the beautiful lady at his side; and Vesta was more pained for her husband than herself, to feel that his outre dress was prejudicing his railroad, as business, no less than beauty, revolts from any outward affectation. At the old aristocratic homes on the Wye River, more scowls than smiles were bestowed on the eccentric parvenu; and at Chestertown, where originated the Peales who drew this hat into their museum, the boys burned tar-barrels on the market space, and marched, in hats of brown loaf-sugar wrappers, like Meshach's, before the dwelling of Vesta's host.

The greater the opposition, the more indomitable Milburn grew to live it down. He wrote to her father to go to Annapolis and work for a railroad charter and state aid, and began grading for his line in the vicinity of his old store at Princess Anne, throwing the first shovelful of earth himself, with the immemorial hat upon his sconce. This time there were no shouts, and he almost regretted it, seeming to feel that jeers carry no deep malice, while silence is hate.

Loyal to her least of vows, and wishing to love and obey him in spirit fully, Vesta felt that his own good-nature was being darkened again by his obstinacy upon this single point of an obsolete hat.

He looked, in their evening circle at Teackle Hall, like a younger and knightlier person, in a modern suit of clothes, and slippers of Vesta's gift. His delicate hand well became the ring she put upon it, and, when he talked high enthusiasm and sense, and stood ready to back them with courage and money, Vesta thought her husband lacked but one thing to make him the equal of his supposititious kinsman, the democratic martyr in the seventeenth century, and that was another head-dress. She almost feared to broach the subject, knowing that an old sore is ever the most sensitive, and being too direct and frank to insinuate or practise any arts upon him.

She was embroidering an evening-cap of velvet for him one day when Mrs. Tilghman sent a hat-box, and in it was a fine new hat of the current style. He answered her letter politely, and put the new hat upon the rack of Teackle Hall, and never touched it again.

Next, Rhoda Holland, his niece, procuring, from some country beau, a beaver-skin—and beavers were growing scarce and dear in that peninsula—had him an elegant cap made of it for the cold weather now coming; but he only kissed her and put it on the rack, and there it tempted the moth.

His chills and fever continued at broken times, but more regular became the dislike and opposition of the old class of society as he undertook to become the promoter of his region. They regarded it as audacity worse than crime: he had outstripped them in wealth, and now was undermining their importance. Many avowed that they would never ride on a railroad built by such a man; others hoped it would break him; some took open ground against his work, and wrote letters to Annapolis to prejudice him with the Legislature, where the Baltimore interest was already crying loudly that an Eastern Shore railroad meant to take Maryland trade and money to Philadelphia. Meshach fiercely responded that, unless the railway took the line of the Maryland counties, Delaware state would build it and carry it off to Newcastle instead of to Elkton, where Meshach meant to unite with a projected Baltimore system. Prudently estimating the sparseness of his fortune to execute a hundred miles of embankment and railroad, Milburn yet kept up a display of surveyors and graders in several counties, and his local patriotism had at least the appreciation of Vesta's little circle.

In the meantime the continued absence of Samson surprised him, and Judge Custis's letters were irregular and long coming as he went farther north, while two letters received by the Widow Dennis were as mystical as they were assuring: one, in a female hand, told her that her son Levin was being tenderly watched, and another, in man's writing, enclosed some money, and said her son would soon be home. Mrs. Dennis was far from happy in this indefinite state of mind, and her heart told her, also, that the absence of James Phoebus was a different strain. She loved that absentee already too well to forgive his silence.

One day, before November, Vesta said to her husband:

"The air and sky are warm and sparkling yet, and the roses are out. You work too hard between your canal case and your railroad. Let us fill the two carriages and drive to old Rehoboth, and eat our dinner there."

He consented, and they took with them Grandmother Tilghman and William, Rhoda Holland, Roxy, and Mrs. Dennis, and also the poor free woman, Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus had released from her chains.

The road passed in sight of the birthplace of the lion of independence in Maryland, Samuel Chase, who forced that hesitating state, by threatenings and even riots, to declare for permanent separation from England, as Henry Winter Davis, by the same means, eighty-five years afterwards, forced her rebels against the Union to show their hands.

Near Chase's birthplace, on the glebe, rose the old Washington Academy, out in a field, raised in that early republican day when a generous fever for education, following the act of tolerance, made some noble school-houses that the growth of towns ultimately discouraged. With four great chimneys above its conical roof, and pediments and cupola, and two wide stories, and high basement, all made in staid, dark brick, the academy yet had a mournful and neglected look, as if, like man, it was ruminating upon the more brutalized times and lessening enlightenment false systems ever require.

"Ah!" said Vesta's husband, "how many a poor boy thou hast sent from yonder mutilated for life, honey, like the lovers of the queen bee."

"How is that?" Vesta inquired.

"You never heard of the queen bee? Women, when they die, may turn to bees, and reverse their hard conditions in this life. The queen bee has no rival in the hive; all other females there are immature, and all the males are dying for the queen. She has five hundred lovers, so lovesick for her that they never work, and forty times as many maids, like Penelope's, all embroidering comb and wax."

"How was that proved?"

"By putting the bees in a glass house and watching them. To God all mankind may be in a glass hive, too, and every buzzer's secret biography be kept."

"And the queen bee's honeymoon?"

"From her that word is taken. She flies high into the air and meets a lover by chance; she has so many that one is sure to be met; she kisses him in that crystal eddy of sunshine, and, in the transport, he is wounded to the heart. How many young drones from the academy have seen thee once and swooned for life!"

"But the queen bee also has a fate some time, sir?"

"Yes. She leaves the ancient hive at last, and settles on an unsightly forest-tree somewhere, and all that love her follow: the long-neglected herb becomes busy with music and sweetness, and the flashing of silver wings, till into some gum-tree cone the farmer gathers the swarm, and it is their home."

Vesta looked up at the poetical illustration, and saw her husband's conical hat, into which she had been hived, and her eyes fell to her mourning weeds.

"Oh, my father!" she thought; "has he kept his good resolutions! It is all I have left to hope for."

They travelled down the aisles of the level forest, sometimes the holly-trees, in their green leafage and red fruit, sometimes the cleanly pine-tree's green, enriching the brown concavity of oaks; and at the scattered settlement of Kingston, the Jackson candidate for governor, Mr. Carroll, bowed from his door. Crossing Morumsco Creek, they bore to the east, and soon saw, on a plain, the still animate ecclesiastical hamlet of Rehoboth, extending its two ancient churches across the vision.

The road ran to the bank of the River Pocomoke, where a ferry was still maintained to the opposite shore and the Virginia land of Accomac, and the cold tide, without a sail, went winding to an oystery estuary of the bay, where the mud at the bottom was so soft that vessels aground in it could still continue sailing, as on the muggy globe that Noah came to shore in.

Close by were oyster-shells high as a natural bluff, made by the Indian gourmands before John Smith's voyage of navigation.

Vesta was set out at the great, ruined Episcopal church that, like a castle of brick, made the gateway of Rehoboth; while William Tilghman and Rhoda strolled into the open door of the brick Presbyterian church farther on, and Milburn put up the horses at the tavern.

"William," Rhoda asked, "was this the first Presbyterian church ever made yer?"

"The first in America, Rhoda. This was Rev. Francis Makemie's church. He lived in Virginia, not far from here, where no other worship was permitted but ours, so he came over the Pocomoke and reared a church of logs at this point, and this is the third or fourth church-building upon the spot. Rehoboth then came to be such a point for worship that the Established Church put up yonder noble old edifice, as if to overawe this Calvinistic one, in 1735."

"It's a quare old house," said Rhoda. "The little doors that opens from the vestiblulete into the side galleries sent a draught right down the preacher's back at the fur end, and when he give out the hymn, 'Blow ye the trumpet, blow,' he always blowed his nose twice. So they boarded up the galleries and let the ceiling down flat, and if we go up thar we can see the other old round ceiling, William."

So they went up the narrow stairs from the door, and came into the tubes of galleries all closed from the congregation, and there, sitting down in the obscurity, the preacher passed his arm around Rhoda's waist.

"Take keer," she said; "maybe you was predestined to be lost yer. I'm skeered to be up yer half in the dark, even with a good man."

Nevertheless, she came a little closer to him, and looked into his eyes with her arch, demure ones. The young rector suddenly kissed her.

"You've brought it on yourself, Rhoda, by looking so pretty in this stern old place of creeds and catechisms. Could you love me if I asked you?"

"You couldn't love me true, William. Your heart is in t'other old church among the bats and foxes, where Aunt Vesty sits this minute."

"No, my sorrow is there, Rhoda. I am trying to build a nest for my heart. We all must love."

"William, I don't think a young man in love can remember so much history when he's sittin' in the dark by his gal."

"Love among the ruins is always melancholy, Rhoda."

"Yes, William, and your love comes out of 'em: the ruins of your old first love. I couldn't make you happy."

"Try," said William; "my fancy wavers towards you. You are a beautiful girl."

"Yes," said Rhoda, practically, "it's time I was gittin' married. I think I'll take you on trial, and watch Aunt Vesty to see if she is jealous of me."

All differences of education passed away, when, standing for a moment with this tall, willowy girl in his arms, her ardent nature in the blush of uncertainty, her very coquetry languishing, like health taking religion captive, the rector of Princess Anne felt that there is no medicine for love but love.

They walked together around the square old edifice, among the graves of Tilghmans, Drydens, Revells, and Beauchamps, and saw the round-capped windows and double doors in arched brick, and, passing back along the road, entered the enclosure of the grand old Episcopal church, which was nearly eighty feet long, and presented its broadside of blackish brick, and double tier of spacious windows, to the absolute desertion of this forest place.

The churchyard was a copse of gum-tree and poplar suckers, and berry bushes, with apple-trees and cedars and wild cherry-trees next above, and higher still the damp sycamores and maples, growing out of myrtle nearly knee-deep upon the waves of old graves.

In beautiful carpentry, the thirteen windows on this massive side upheld in their hand-worked sashes more than four hundred panes of dim glass, and two great windows in the gable had fifty panes each, and stood firm, though the wall between them, fifty feet in width, had fallen in, and been replaced with poorer workmanship. In the opposite gable was another door that had been forced open, and, as they stepped across the sill, a crack, like ice first stepped upon, went splitting the long and lofty vacancy with warning rumbles.

Now the whole interior, in fine perspective, stood exposed, at least seventy-five by fifty feet, like a majestic hall unbroken by any side-galleries, and with double stories of windows shedding a hazy light, and, at the distant end, a low pulpit, with spacious altar. The walls of this neglected temple were two feet thick, and its high ceiling was kept from falling down by ten rude wooden props of recent rough carpentry; the pews were stately, high-fenced things, numbered in white letters on a black ground, and each four-sided, to contain ten persons; the rotting damask cushions in many of them told of a former aristocracy, while now all the congregation could be assembled in a single pew, and worship was unknown but once a year, when the bishop came to read his liturgy to dust and desolation.

So, on the opposite western cape of the Chesapeake, shivered the Roman priests of Calvert's foundation, in the waste of old St. Mary's; the folds had left the shepherds, and fifty people only came to worship in the kirk of the earliest Presbyterians.

Two tall, once considered elegant, stoves were nearly midway up the cracking church-floor; and Mary, the free woman, had made a fire in one of them, and the pine wood was roaring, and the long height of pipe was smoking. Startled by the fire, a venerable opossum came out of one of the pews, and waggled down the aisle, like a gray devotee who had said his prayers, and feared no man.

Vesta was reading her prayer-book aloud near the stove to the pretty widow and Grandmother Tilghman. In a few moments the young rector emerged from a curious old gallery for black people, by the door, wearing his surplice; and he read the service at the desk, plaintive and simple, Milburn and his group responding in the room a thousand might have worshipped in.

"Cousin Vesta," the minister said, after the service, "Miss Holland is going to try to love me. Mr. Milburn, may I address her?"

"She is a wilful piece," Meshach said; "you must school her first. Let my wife give my consent."

Vesta went to both, and kissed them:

"I feel so much encouraged, dear Rhoda and William, to see love beginning all about me. Now, Norah, if you could be just to James Phoebus, who is proving his love to you, perhaps, with his life!"

"Yes, that is a match I approve of," said Grandmother Tilghman, "but I don't want Bill to marry. Disappointed men make rash selections."

"Oh," said Rhoda, "don't conglatulate him too soon; I haven't tuk him yet. He's goin' teach me outen the books, and I'll teach him outen the forest."

They walked together to the river bank, and Mrs. Dennis had the poor woman, Mary, tell the adventures of Jimmy Phoebus to save her from slavery. All were deeply moved.

"Now, Norah," Grandmother Tilghman said, "the moment that man comes back you go to him and kiss him, and say, 'James, you have been the only father to my son. Do you want me to be your wife?' This world is made for marrying, Norah. Women have no other career. Nature does not value the brain of Shakespeare, but keeps the seed of every vagrant plant warm, and marries everything."

"Well," said Vesta, "Norah loves James Phoebus; don't you, Norah?"

The widow blushed.

"Take him, my pretty neighbor," said Milburn.

As they all looked at her, she suddenly cried:

"I want to, indeed. I would have done so before, but I am superstitious. Who is it that feeds me so mysteriously?"

"Has he been coming of late?" asked Mrs. Tilghman.

"No, not since you were married, Vesta."

"Then I think it will come no more," Milburn said. "You have waited longer than I did."

His eyes sought his wife's. He added:

"Will I ever be more than your husband?"

"Yes," said Grandmother Tilghman, with a special effort, "when you wear a hat a young wife is not ashamed of."

All felt a cold thrill at these words from the blind woman. Milburn said, gravely,

"How can you know about hats, when you cannot see them?"

"Oh," said Grandmother, herself a little frightened, "that hat I think I can smell."

* * * * *

That same night, in Princess Anne, Mrs. Dennis, in her little cottage, undressed herself by a fragment of hearth-fire that now and then flashed upon the picture of her husband, as he had left her sixteen years before, when Levin was a baby—a rich blonde, youthful man, dressed in naval uniform, like Decatur, whose birthplace was so near his own.

His golden hair curled upon his forehead, his blue eyes were full of handsome daring, and his red, pouting mouth was like a woman's; upon his arm a corded chapeau was held, epaulettes tasselled his shoulders, his rich blue coat was slashed with gold along the wide lappels, and stood stiffly around his neck and fleecy stock and fan-shaped shirt-ruffles. He seemed to be a mere boy, but of the mettle which made American officers and privateersmen of his days the only guerdons of the republicanism of the seas against the else universal dominion of England.

This portrait, the last of her family possessions, was the young sailor's parting gift to her when he sailed in the Ida, leaving her a mere girl, with his son upon her breast. The picture hung above the lowly door, the bolt whereof was never fastened in that serene society, and seldom is to this day.

Mrs. Dennis knelt upon the bare floor, and raised her branching arms, white as her spirit, to the lover of her youth:

"Oh, thou I have adored since God gave me to feel the beauty and strength of man in my childhood, if I have ever looked on man but thee with love or wavering, rebuke me now for the offence I am to do, if such it be, in choosing another father for thy boy!"

A low wail seemed to be breathed upon the midnight from somewhere near, and a sick man's cough seemed to break the perfect silence. The widow's hand instinctively covered her bosom as she listened, and, deep in the spirit of her prayer, she continued:

"Oh, Bowie, if thou livest, let me know! May I not live to see thee come and find me in another's arms; thy look would kill me. If thou art detained by enemies, by savage people, or by foreign love, no matter what thy errors, I will still be true! Give me some token by the God that has thee in his keeping, whether thou liest on the ocean's floor or lookest from the stars. If thou art dead, love of my youth, assure me, oh, I pray thee!"

The wail and hacking cough seemed to be repeated very near. A footstep seemed to come.

The door flew open, and in the moonlight stood a man, pale as a ghost, of bandit look, with Spanish-looking garments, and head and neck tied up with cerements, like wounded people in the cockpits of ships of war.

He bent upon her the eyes of the portrait above the door. How changed! how like! There seemed upon his throat the stain of blood.

The widow, fascinated, frozen still, let fall her arms of ivory, and, as she gazed, her beautiful neck, strained in horror and astonishment, received upon its snow the rapture of Diana's shine.

The effigy, so like her husband, yet so altered, reached towards her his hand, on which a diamond caught the moon, and seemed to drink it. A wail, like the others she had heard, broke from his lips, and said the words:

"To lose those charms! To lose that heart! O God!"

As thus he stood, ghastly and supplicating, as if he would fall and die upon her threshold, another hand came forward in the moonlight, and drew the door between them. A voice she had not heard tenderly exclaimed:

"I love him as I never loved A male!"

"It is my husband's spirit," the widow breathed. "I cannot marry."

She swooned upon her floor, before the dying fire.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

VIRGIE'S FLIGHT.

Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered, willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.

Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of old Snow Hill in London.

Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian, which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling tide of blood; and Worcester was the name of the county, as the court and jail might tell.

Hidden in the sand, like Benjamin's cup in the bag of flinty corn, a golden lustre yet seemed to betray Snow Hill, as the sun rose into its old trees, and woke the liquid-throated birds, and finally made the old brick and older whitewashed houses gleam, and exhale a soft, blue smoke. Virgie heard a sound as of hoofs upon a bridge, and saw, across the lily-bordered river, the Custis carriage winding up a golden road.

"Alone!" said Virgie; "love has gone. Now I must live for freedom."

"Breakfast, Miss," spoke a neat, kind-faced, yet ready woman, of Virgie's own size and color; "my husband is going to drive you out of town before any of the white people are up to see you."

At the table was a mulatto man, whom the woman introduced as her husband.

"Mrs. Hudson," Virgie said, "you are doing so much for me! may the good Lord pay you back!"

"Oh, no," replied the woman, "I am always up at this hour. I work hard, because I am trying to buy my mother, who is still a slave."

"How came you free?" Virgie asked, wistfully.

"I saved a sick gentleman's life, and he bought me for it, and gave me my freedom. See, I have a pass that tells the color of my eyes and skin, my weight, and everything. With this I can go into Delaware and the free states. I wish you had one, Miss Virgie."

"Oh, Mrs. Hudson, I dearly wish I had. Let me read it. Why, I could almost pass for you, from this description."

"Indeed you could," the housewife said; "we are not of the same age, but white people don't read a pass very careful."

"How I would love anybody that could get me such a pass!"

"I have given my word of honor that I will never lend it. Much as I like to help my color to freedom, I cannot break my word. To-morrow I have to go into Delaware with my pass to nurse a lady."

"You attend the sick, Mrs. Hudson?"

"Yes, I have a kind of call that way, Miss Virgie. Ever since I was a girl I pulled herbs and tried them on myself, and studied 'tendin' on people, watchin' their minds, that is so much of sickness, and how to wrap and rub them. My husband oysters down in the inlets. Here is his wagon."

"The Lord remember you in need, dear Mrs. Hudson."

The old wagon, an open thing, to peddle oysters and fish, was driven across the town to the south, and soon was in the open country, going towards Virginia. A smell of salt bay seemed in the air; the hawks' nests in dead trees indicated the element that subsisted everything, and the trees in the fields were often lordly in size, though sand and small oak and pine woods were seldom out of sight. As they turned into a lane near a little roadside place of worship, a young white man rode by on horseback, and, seeing Virgie, reined in and shouted,

"Purty, purty, purty as peaches and cream! Ole Virginny blood is in them eyes, by the Ensign!"

The colored man muttered, "Go 'long, Mr. Wise!"

"By the Ensign now," continued the man, who was young, but of a cadaverous countenance, "if 'tis a Maryland huzzy, she is marvellous. What's the name, angel gal?"

"She's a Miss Spence. I'm a takin' her home yer," the mulatto man interposed, hastily, and went in the gate, while the horseman, with a shout like one intoxicated, gallopped towards the north.

"I'm sorry he seen you, sho'!" the conductor said; "that's Henry A. Wise, the big lawyer from Accomac. Maybe he'll inquire at Snow Hill, where he's goin' to court."

"What house is this, Mr. Hudson?" Virgie asked, seeing at the end of the short lane a thick-set house and porch, with small farm-buildings around it.

"That's ole Spring Hill, built by the first of the Milburns; by the one that made the will leavin' his hat and nothin' else to be son. It's got brick ends. I 'spect they had money when they come here, Virgie."

The quickened mettle of the girl noticed that he had ceased to call her "Miss."

"Now," said Hudson, "I'm goin' to leave you here with my sister till I see about gittin' a boat. If you is tracked to Snow Hill, it'll be found you come out this way, now. The inlets run up along the coast yer past the Delaware line. I'm a goin' to sail you past Snow Hill agin an' double on 'em. Yes, Miss Virgie, I'll git you away if it costs all I have got together."

An excited light seemed to be in his eyes.

Virgie was put in a loft over the kitchen of the house, and left to her contemplations. The place was nearly dark, and she was jaded for want of sleep, the past night's excitement having shaken her nervous system, and soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream almost awake.

She saw Meshach Milburn, who seemed to have become a little, old-faced child, reaching up to an older person, very like himself in features, and taking a steeple hat from his hand. This older child reached back, and took a similar hat from another, still older; and then the first two vanished, and two old men were giving and receiving the hat.

Then nothing was left but the hat alone, which was a huge object with fire belching from it, and by the flame a circle of wizards went round and round in dizzy glee, all wearing hats of similar form, but higher, higher, till they reached the sky and stars, and each was spouting flames.

Among these riotous wizards she recognized the features of the tall kidnapper and of Judge Custis; and Vesta, too, was there, and old Aunt Hominy, all giving a hasty look of shame or sorrow or severity at her, till she, fearing, yet fascinated, leaped into the circle, and danced around and around with the rest, till her feet made a fiery path and her head was burning hot, and finally she lost her balance, and fell into the great hat, whose high walls, like mountains, surrounded her, and nothing could she see in the bottom of the old felt tile but a little grave, and peeping from it was the face of the murdered child the kidnapper had taken away.

"Come," said a voice, and Virgie awoke, with fever in her temples and hot hands, to see the head of her conductor looking into the loft as if with red-hot eyeballs.

She only knew that she was going again in the old wagon, and a boy was in it, and that after a certain time, she could not tell how long, she was helped to the ground at an old landing, where the road stopped, and was placed on board a sort of scow, which the breeze, laden with mosquitoes, was carrying into a broad, islet-sprinkled water.

The man Hudson was sounding, and was watching the sail, while the boy steered, and Virgie was lying, sick and cold, in the middle of the skiff, covered with the man's large coat.

It seemed to her to be afternoon, and the ocean somewhere near, as she heard low thunder, like breaking waves; and once, when she rose, in a stupefied way, to look, there were familiar objects on both shores, and she thought it was the Old Town beach near Snow Hill inlet.

A little later the man brought her oysters and some cold pork-rib, with corn-bread, to eat, and the shores grew closer, and finally seemed almost to meet, as the skiff, scraping the bottom, darted through a narrow strait.

Then the stars were shining over her, and the waters grew wide again, and, lying in a trance of flying lights and images, she thought she felt her lips kissed, and a voice say "Darling!"

Finally, she felt lifted up and carried, and, when she could realize the situation, she found herself lying on a pile of shingles at an old wharf, and the man, beside her, was weeping, as he watched the boat receding down a moonlit aisle of wave.

"My boy, my poor ole woman," she heard her conductor mutter, "I never can come back to you no mo'!"

"Why?" spoke Virgie, hardly realizing what she said.

"Because—because—you did it!" the man exclaimed, with ardent eyes, seen through his streaming tears.

"Oh, tell me where I am!" Virgie said. "Is it far to freedom now?"

She looked at the sky, all agitated with clouds and stars moving across each other, and it seemed the nearest world of all.

"Is my father there?" thought Virgie, "my dear white father? Can he see me here, sick and lonely, and hate me?"

"We're at de Shingle landing; yonder is St. Martin's," said the negro, cautiously; "there's two roads nigh whar we air, goin' to the North, dear Virgie; one is the stage-road, and t'other is the shingle-trail through the Cypress Swamp.

"Take the road that's the safest to Freedom," Virgie sighed.

In a few moments, walking over the ground, they came to a place where the cart-trail crossed a sandy road, and went beyond it, along the edge of a small stream. The man walked a few steps up the better road undecidedly, and suddenly drew Virgie back into the bushes, but not quick enough to be unobserved by two men coming on in an old, rattling wagon.

"My skin!" cried the man driving, a youngish man, of sharp, but not unkindly eyes, "thar's a sniptious gal. Come out yer and show yourself!"

Virgie felt the man's eyes resting on her, but not with the coarse ardor of his companion, who wore a wide slouched hat and red shirt, and was bandaged around the head and throat, yet from his ghastly pale face, like death, on which some blood seemed to be smeared, and to stain the bandage at his neck, lay a coarse leer, and he kissed his mouth at her, and uttered:

"O flexuosa! esquisita! It is dainty, Sorden!"

"Now ef we was a going t'other way, Van Dorn," the driver said, "we could give them a lift. Boy, what are you out fur? Where's your passes?"

"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."

"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same woman! where did you get this pass?"

"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."

His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,

"I love him as I never loved A male!"

"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon started south.

"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy Hudson for assisting a runaway!"

"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only road!"

He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the swampy branch.

"What have you done?" cried Virgie.

"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."

With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the reptile.

Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal dream.

The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each insist upon the last word to say:

"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you didn't!" "You did, you did!"

Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born, had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night, till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan disputing for her soul.

As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!" groaned back.

"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"

She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"

The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.

He stared at her in wonder, but too wistfully. The cat-briers hung across the opening, and grapevines, like cables of sunken ships, fell many a fathom through the crystal waves of night; but the North Star seemed to find a way to peep through everything, and Virgie heard the words from Hudson, once, of—

"Jess over this branch a bit we is in Delaware!"

Then the crickets and tree-frogs, the bullfrogs and the whippoorwills, the owls and everything, seemed to drown his voice and halloo for hours, "We is in Delaware! we is, we is! we is in Del-a-a-ware!"

A little warming, kindly light at length began to blaze their trail along, as if some gentle predecessor, with a golden adze, had chipped the funereal trees and made them smile a welcome. Small fires were burning in the vegetable mould or surface brush, and the opacity of the forest yielded to the pretty flame which danced and almost sang in a household crackle, like a young girl in love humming tunes as she kindles a fire.

The mighty swamp now grew distinct, yet more inaccessible, as its inner edges seemed transparent in the line of fires, like curtains of lace against the midnight window-panes. The Virginia creeper, light as the flounces of a lady, went whirling upward, as if in a dance; the fallen giant trees were rich in hanging moss; laurel and jasmine appeared beyond the bubbling surface of long, green morass, where life of some kind seemed to turn over comfortably in the rising warmth, like sleepers in bed.

Suddenly the man took Virgie up and carried her through a stream of running water, brown with the tannin matter of the swamp.

"We is in Delaware," he said, soon after, as they reached a camp of shingle sawyers, all deserted, and lighted by the fire, the golden chips strewn around, and the sawdust, like Indian meal, that suggested good, warm pone at Teackle Hall to Virgie.

She put her feet, soaked with swamp water, at a burning log to warm, and hardly saw a mocasson snake glide round the fire and stop, as if to dart at her, and glide away; for Virgie's mind was attributing this kindly fire to the presence of Freedom.

"Oh, I should like to lie here and go to sleep," she said, languidly; "I am so tired."

The man Hudson, wringing wet with the journey's difficulties, threw his arms around her and drew her to his damp yet fiery breast.

"We will sleep here, then," he breathed into her lips; "I love you!"

The incoherence of everything yielded to these sudden words, and on the young maid's startled nature came a reality she had not understood: her guide was drunken with passion.

She struggled in his arms with all her might, but was as a switch in a maniac's hands.

"I stole my ole woman's pass fur you," the infatuated ruffian sighed; "you said you would love the man who got you one, Virgie. You is mine!"

A suffocating sense and heat, more than animal nature, seemed to enclose them. The girl struggled free, her lithe figure exerted with all her dying strength to preserve her modesty.

"Hudson," she cried, "I will tell your wife! God forgive you for insulting a poor, sick, helpless girl in this wild swamp!"

"My wife is dead to me, Virgie. You is the only wife I has now. Here we shall sleep and forgit my children and my little home that was enough fur me, gal, till your beauty come and tuk me from it."

"Stop!" the girl called, with her face blanched even in her fever, though not with fear, as her white blood rose proudly. "If you do not keep away, I will throw myself in that deep pool and drown. I would rather die than cheat your good wife as you have done."

"Nothing is yer," the negro said, "but you, an' me, an' Love. I would not let you drown. You are too beautiful. We will get to the free states together and live for each other. Kiss me!"

He darted upon her again and bent her fair head back by the fallen braids of her silky hair.

The tall woods filled with majestic light; something roared as if the winds had gone astray and were rushing towards them.

"Hark!" cried Virgie. "God is coming to punish you."

As she spoke the ground beside them burst into flames and black smoke. The man's arms relaxed; he looked around him and exclaimed,

"It's the underground fire. Run fur your life!"

He led the way, running to the north, as they had been going. In a moment fire, like a golden wall, rose across their path.

They turned whence they had come, and the fire there was like a lake of lava, and over it the enormous trees seemed to warm their hands, and up the dry vines, like monkeys of flame, the forked spirits of the burning earth dodged and chased each other.

"Gal, I can't leave you to perish," the desperate man shouted; "you must love me or we'll die together."

He threw his wet great-coat around her head, so that she could not breathe the smoke nor spoil her beauty, and dashed into the fire ahead of them.

* * * * *

Virgie awoke, lying upon the ground, the stars still standing in the sky, but some streaks of light in the east betokening dawn.

Her hands were full of soot, her skirts were burned, some smarting pains were in her legs and feet, but she could walk.

"Where is that poor, deluded man?" she thought.

A groan came from the ground, and there lay something nearly naked, burrowing his face in a pool of swamp water.

"Thank the Lord you are not dead," the girl said, "but have lived to repent and be a better man."

He rose up and looked at her with a face all blackened and raw and hideous to see.

"Merciful Lord!" exclaimed Virgie; "what ails you, pore man?"

"The Lord has punished me for my wickedness," he groaned. "Virgie, you must lead me now; I am gone blind."



CHAPTER XXXIX.

VIRGIE'S FLIGHT (continued).

"Can you walk, Hudson?" asked Virgie, when her horror would permit.

"Yes, child, I can walk, I reckon; but both my eyes is burned out. Oh, my pore old wife: she could nurse me so well. I have lost her."

The girl comforted the sightless man, and led him on, indifferent to danger. He waded the deep places, where the water soothed his wounds and filled his blistered sockets with cool mud.

"Blessed is the pure in heart," he murmured, as they reached some sandy ground and sank down. "You, Virgie, can see God; I never can."

The great Cypress Swamp of Delaware—counterpart of the Dismal Swamp in Virginia—the northern border of which they had now reached, had probably been once a great inlet or shallow bay in the encroaching sand-bar of the peninsula, and was filled with oysters and fish, which in time were imprisoned and became the manure of a cypress forest that soon started up when springs of water flowed under the sand and moistened the seed; and for ages these forests had been growing, and had been prostrated, and had dropped their leaves and branches in the great inlet's bed, until a deep ligneous mass of combustible stuff raised higher and higher the level of the swamp, and, dried with ages more of time than dried the mummies of the Pharaohs, it often opened tunnels to burrowing fire, which at some point of its course belched forth and lighted the hollow trees, and raged for weeks. Such a fire they had come through.

Virgie, in the early daylight, came upon a small, swarthy boy, driving a little cart and ox.

"Are you a colored boy?" Virgie asked.

"No," answered the boy, proudly. "I'm Indian-river Indian; reckon I'm a little nigger."

"Take this poor man in and I will pay you. Where are you going?"

"To Dagsborough landing, for salt."

"Leave me at Dagsborough, at the old Clayton house," spoke up the blind man; "it's empty. I can die thar or git a doctor."

Before the people were up they entered a little hamlet, on that stage road from which they had made the night's detour, and saw a few small houses and a little shingle-boarded church near by among the woods, and one large house of a deserted appearance was at the town's extremity. The man said, "This is John M. Clayton's birthplace: my wife used to work yer."

"Virgie!" exclaimed a familiar voice.

The girl turned, her ears still ringing with the echoes of the swamp, and saw a face she knew, and ran to the breast beneath it, crying,

"Samson Hat! Oh, friend, love me like my mother. I am very ill."

"Pore, darlin' child," Samson said; "no love will I ever bodder you wid agin but a father's. Why air you so fur from home?"

"I'm sold, Samson: I'm trying to get free. The kidnappers is after me. Oh, save me!"

"I've jist got away from 'em, Virgie. The ole woman, Patty Cannon, set me free. I promised her I would kidnap somebody younger dan ole Samson. Bless de Lord! I come dis way!"

He led her into the oak-trees of the old church grove, where English worship had been celebrated just a hundred years; and she gave him money to buy medicine and get a doctor for the blind man, and to purchase her a shawl at the store. Then Virgie sank into a fevered sleep under the old oak-trees, and, when she knew more, was gliding in a boat that Samson was sailing down a broad piece of water, and her head was in his lap.

"You air pure as an angel yit, my little creatur," Samson said; "and now I'm a-takin' you down the Indian River into Rehoboth Bay; and arter dark I'll git you up the beach to Cape Hinlopen, and maybe I kin buy you a passage on some of dem stone boats dat's buildin' de new breakwater dar, and dat goes back to de Norf."

"Oh, Samson, if I could love any man it would be you," Virgie said; "but I cannot love any now except my dear white father. Who is he?"

"De Lord, I reckon, has got yo' pedigree, Virgie."

"Am I dying, Samson?" asked the girl, wistfully, with her brilliant eyes full of fever. "Oh, friend, let me die so good that Miss Vesty and my father can come and kiss me!"

"Tell me about Princess Anne an' my dear old Marster Meshach Milburn, dat I'se leff so long, Virgie!" the old pugilist said, wiping his eyes of tears.

She began to try to remember, but faces and events ran into each other, and she felt aware that her mind was wandering, but could not bring it back; and so the boat, sailing in sight of the ocean and the stately ships there, grounded after noon almost within sound of the surf.

Sheltered in a piece of woods for some hours, Virgie found herself, at dark, carried in old Samson's arms up a beach of the sea where the sand was yielding and seldom firm, except at the very edge of the surf, which rolled ominously and at times became a roar, and often swept to the low, sedgy bank. Lightning played across the black sea, lifting it up, as it seemed, and showing vessels making either out or in, and finally thunder burst upon the gathering confusion, and Samson said:

"Dar's a gun in dat thunder!"

The next flash of lightning showed a vessel close to the shore, coming rapidly in on the southeaster, and her gun was fired again, and feeble hailing was heard; but the storm now broke all at once, and a wave threw Samson to the ground and nearly carried Virgie back with it to the boiling sea; but the faithful old man fought for her, and she ran at his side, uttering no complaint, till once, as they stopped to get breath, and the heavenly fire drew into sight every foot, as it seemed, of that vast ocean, cannonading it also with majestic artillery, the girl sighed,

"Freedom is beautiful!"

"Oh, Virgie," Samson answered, covering her with his own coat, "if I could buy you free, pore chile, I'd a-mos' go into slavery to save you from dis night."

"I can die in there," Virgie said, pointing to the waves; "they must not catch me."

A wail came out of the storm, so close before that it hushed them both, and the lightning lifted upon their eyes a stranding vessel, so close, it seemed, that they could touch it, and she was full of people, hallooing, but not in any intelligible tongue.

As the black night fell upon this magic-lantern sketch they heard a crash of wave and wood, and falling spars and awful shrieks, and, when the next vivid flash of lightning came, nothing was visible but floating substance, and spluttering cries came out of the bosom of the sea, and a black man, flung, as if out of a cannon, upon a wave that drenched these wanderers, struck the ground at their feet, and looked into Samson's eyes as the convulsion of death seized his chest and feet.

Before they could speak to each other, the beach was full of similar corpses, a moment before alive as themselves, and every one was naked and black.

"It's a slave-ship, foundered yer," cried Samson.

He caught at a yawl-boat driving past him, in the many things that drifted around their feet, and Virgie saw painted upon its bow the word "Ida."

"Samson," she said, feeling all the influences of Princess Anne again, and forgetting her own misery, "it's Mrs. Dennis's husband come home and shipwrecked."

* * * * *

When Virgie next remembered, she was on a vast hill of sand, near a lighthouse that was built upon it, and flashed its lenses sleepily upon a sullen break of day, the mutual lights showing the tops of trees rising out of the sand, where a forest had been buried alive, like little twigs in amber.

Almost naked with fighting the storm, Samson Hat slept at her side, peaceful as hale age and virtue could enjoy the balm of oblivion in life.

"Happy are the black," thought the sick girl, "that take no thought on things this white blood in me makes so big: on freedom and my father. Father, do love me before I die!"

She knelt on the great sand hillock by Cape Henlopen and prayed till she, too, lost her knowledge of self, and was sleeping again at Samson's side. She dreamed of innumerable angels flying all around her, and yet their voices were so harsh they awoke her at last, and still these seraphs were flying in the day. She saw their wings, and moved the old man at her side to say,

"Samson, why cannot these angels sing?"

The old man looked up and faintly smiled:

"Poor Virgie, dey is wild-fowls, all bewildered by dat storm: geese and swans. Dey can't sing like angels."

"Yes," said the girl; "something sings, I know. What is it?"

"Jesus, maybe," the negro answered, looking at her, his eyes full of tears.

* * * * *

The great Breakwater, which required forty years and nearly a million tons of stone to build it, was then just commencing, and where it was to be, within the shallow bight of Henlopen, they saw the wrecks of many vessels, some sunken, some shattered in collision, some stranded in the marsh, proving the needs of commerce for such a work, and also the fury of the storm that had so innocently vanished, like a sleeping tiger after his bloody meal.

In the gentle sunshine floated the American flag upon several vessels there—the flag that first kissed the breeze upon that spot in the year 1776, when Esek Hopkins raised over the Alfred the dyes of the peach and cream in the centre of his little squadron. And there, along the low bluff of the Kill, still lay the shingle-boarded town of Lewes, in the torpor of nearly two hundred years, or since the Dutch De Vries had settled it in 1631. Lord Delaware, Argall, and the Swede, Penn, Blackbeard, Paul Jones, Lord Rodney, a thousand heroes, had known it well; the pilots, like sea-gulls, had their nests there; the Marylanders had invaded it, the Tories had seized it, pirates had been suckled there; and now the courts and lawyers had forsaken it, to go inland to Georgetown.

"Virgie," said Samson, "I'll try to buy some of de stone-boat captains to carry you to Phildelfy."

He waded the Kill, carrying her, and left her in an old Presbyterian church at the skirt of Lewes, and procured medicine for her, and then labored in vain nearly all day to get her passage to a free state. The reply was invariable: "Can't take the risk of the whippin'-post and pillory for no nigger. Can't lose a long job like bringin' stone to the Breakwater to save one nigger."

At the hotel a colored man beckoned Samson aside—a fine-looking man, of a gingerbread color—and they went into the little old disused court-house, in the middle of a street, where there was a fire.

"Brother," said the stranger, "I see by your actions that you're trying to git a passage North. Is it fur yourself?"

"No," Samson said, taking an inventory of the other's fine chest and strength, and mentally wishing to have a chance at him; "I'm a free man, and kin go anywhere; but I have a friend."

"Why, old man," spoke the other, frankly, "I'm the agent of our society at this pint."

"What is it?" asked Samson, warily.

"The Protection Society. They educated me right yer. I went to school with white boys. Now, where is your friend?"

"What kin you do fur her?" asked Samson.

"It's a gal, is it? Why, I can just put her in my buggy, made and provided for the purpose, and drive her to the Quaker settlement."

"Where's that?"

"Camden—only thirty miles off. I've got free passes all made out. Give yourself, brother, no more concern."

Samson looked at the handsome person long and well. The man stood the gaze modestly.

"Oh, if I had some knowledge!" spoke Samson; "I might as well be a slave if I know nothin'. I can't read. I wish I could read your heart!"

"I wish you could," said the man; "then you would trust me."

"What is your name?"

"Samuel Ogg."

"I want you to hold up your hand and swear, Sam Ogg, that you will never harm the pore chile I bring you. Say, 'Lord, let my body rot alive, an' no man pity me, if I don't act right by her.'"

"It's a severe oath," said the stranger, "but I see your kind interest in the lady. Indeed, I'm only doing my duty."

He repeated the words, however, and Samson added, "God deal with you, Sam Ogg, as you keep dat oath. Now come with me!"

The girl was found asleep, but delirious, her large eyes, in which the blue and brown tints met in a kind of lake color, being wide open, and almost lost in their long lashes, while flood and fire, sun and frost, had beaten upon the slender encasement of her gentle life, that still kept time like some Parian clock saved from a conflagration, in whose crystal pane the golden pendulum still moves, though the hands point astray in the mutilated face.

Her teeth were shown through the loving lips she parted in her stormy dreams, like waves tossing the alabaster sails of the nautilus, or like some ear of Indian corn exposed in the gale that blows across the tasselled field.

Her raiment, partly torn from her, showed her supple figure and neck, and, beneath her mass of silky hair, her white arm, like an ivory serpent, sustained her head, her handsome feet being fine and high-bred, like the soul that bounded in her maiden ambition.

There had been days when such as she called Antony away from his wife, and Caesar from his classical selfishness; when on many an Eastern throne such beauty as this stirred to murmurous glory armies beyond compute, and clashed the cymbals of prodigious conquests. She lay upon the altar-cushions of the church, like young Isaac upon his father's altar, and where the mourners knelt to pray for God's reconcilement, the cruelty of their law flashed over her like Abraham's superstitious knife.

Priceless was this young creature, in noble hands, as wife or daughter, human food or fair divinity, and all the precious mysteries of woman awake in her to love and conjugality, like song and seed in the spring bird; yet a hard, steely prejudice had shut her out from every institution and equality, let every crime be perpetrated upon her, made the scent of freedom in her nostrils worse than the incentive of the thief, and has outlasted her half a century, and is self-righteous and inflexible yet.

In that old churchyard that enclosed her slept revolutionary officers, who helped to gain freedom: they might be willing to rise with her, not to be buried in the same enclosure.

How small is religion, how false democracy, how far off are the judgments of heaven! There stood over the pulpit an inscription, itself presumptuous with aristocracy, saying, "The dead in Christ shall rise first;" as if those truly dead in the humility of Christ would not prefer to rise last!

Samson watched his new friend narrowly, whose countenance was profoundly piteous, and his teeth and lip made a "Tut-tut!" Satisfied with the man, Samson knelt by Virgie and kissed her once.

"Pore rose of slavery," said Samson, "forgive me dat I courted you like a gal, instead of like an angel. I am old, and ashamed of myself. Dear, draggled flower, we may never meet agin. May the Lord, if dis is his holy temple, save you pure and find you a home, Virgie. Good-bye!"

"Come," said the man, as Samson sat bowed and weeping, "the buggy is ready; I'll wrap you warm, Miss."

"Freedom!" spoke the girl, awakening; "oh, I must find it."

* * * * *

The next that Virgie knew, she was in a cabin loft, and voices were heard speaking in a room below.

"See me!" said one; "we sell you, dat's sho'! See me now! You make de best of it. Sam Ogg yer, we sold twenty-two times. Sam will be sold wid you and teach yo' de Murrell game."

"Politely, gentlemen," said a feminine voice; "I don't know that I have the nerve for it. My occupation has been marrying them. It is true that the hue-and-cry has made that branch dull, but I had great talent for it."

"Kidnapping," said a third voice, "is running low. It surrounds the whole slave belt from Illinois to Delaware. The laws of Illinois were made in our interests till Governor Harrison, whose free man was kidnapped, raised an excitement out there six years ago. Newt Wright, Joe O'Neal, and Abe Thomas were the smartest kidnappers along the Kentucky line. But Joe Johnson, who is getting ready to go south, will be the last man of enterprise in the business. John A. Murrell's idea is to divide fair with black men, sell and steal them back, and I think it is sagacious. It's safer, any way, than Patty Cannon's other plan."

"What is that, Mr. Ogg?" said the feminine-voiced negro.

"Making away with the negro-traders, they say."

"See me! see me!" exclaimed the first voice. "Dey'll hang her some day fur dat."

"Now," resumed Mr. Ogg, "a man of intelligence like you and me, Mr. Ransom—pardon, sir, does your shackle incommode you? I'll stuff it with some wool—"

"Politely, Mr. Ogg; I'm ironed rather too tight."

"I say, Mr. Ransom, you and I can always play the average slaveholder for a fool. Why, I hardly get into any family before I make love to some member of it, and if I don't vamose with a black wench, it's with her mistress."

"Ah, Mr. Ogg, they are perfectly fiendish in resenting that!"

"Of course, but there's a grand tit-for-tat going through all nature. Why, sir, the pleasures of the far South, to a man of art and enterprise like you, far exceed this poor, plain region. Take the roof off slavery and the blacks have rather the best of it; the whites would think so if they could see what is going on."

"Politely, Mr. Ogg; will not the entire institution some day blow itself out, like one of their Western steamboats?"

"No doubt of it, Mr. Ransom. When we have disposed of you, and you can see the country for yourself, observe how sensitive slaveholding is! A thousand anxieties lie in it. They believe in insurrections, rapes, and incendiaries. A perfect sleep they hardly know, but go prowling around night and day, driven by their suspicions. It makes them warlike, yet unhappy, and the slaves eat the ground poor. Besides, they have terrible enemies in the negro-traders, whom they look down on socially, and really drive them into sympathy with the negroes. Mr. Murrell, for instance, has a grand plan for a slave insurrection. He says white society is all against him, and he'll get even with it."

"See me, see me!" hoarsely chimed in another voice. "Slavery is bad scared, sho'! Joe Leonard Smith, Catholic, over on de western sho', has jess set twelve niggers free. Governor Charley Ridgely has set two hundred and fifty free. John Randolph, dey say, is gwyn to set more dan three hundred free. Dar's fifty abolition societies in Nawf Carolina, eleven in Maryland, eight in ole Virginny, two in Delaware. Ho, ho! dey set' em free and we'll steal' em back! Ole Derrick Molleston will never be out of pork an' money!"

"Politely, gentlemen," said the individual with the shackle. "Have you heard of the incendiary proclamation issued in Boston by David Walker, telling all slaves that it is their religious duty to rise?"

"Yes, and rise they will, but to what end? It will be a big scare, but no war. The next thing they will stop reading among all slaves, prevent emancipation by law, and watch the colored meeting-houses. The fire will be buried under the amount of the fuel, yet all be there."[6]

"Mr. Ogg, your experience is remarkable. And you have been sold and run away in nearly every slave state? Politely, sir, are they not kidnapping white men, too? Who is this Morgan that was stolen last year in the State of New York?"

"Oh, that's a renegade Free Mason, Mr. Ransom. As much fuss is made over him as if we did not steal a hundred free people every day. It only shows that kidnapping of all sorts is getting to be unpopular. If a new political party can be made on stealing one white Morgan, don't you think another party will some day rise on stealing several millions of black Morgans?"

"See me! see me!" exclaimed the hoarse voice, suddenly.

"Escaping, are you?" cried the second voice.

"Politely, gentlemen, politely!" was heard from the third voice, some distance off in the dark, and then chasing footsteps followed, and Virgie arose and peeped below.

A fire was burning in a clay chimney beside a table, on which were meat and liquor. The girl swung herself out of the loft to the ground-floor, and, seizing the meat and bread, rushed noiselessly into the night.

She hardly knew what she was doing until she had crossed a bridge and come to the edge of a small town, around which she took a road to the right that led into another country road, and this she followed a mile or more, till she saw a small brick house, by a stile and pole-well, in the edge of woods.

The light from a little dormer-window in the garret beamed so brightly that it charmed Virgie's soul with the fascination of warmth and home, and, without thinking, she crossed the stile, bathed her hot temples at the well, and walked into the kitchen before the fire.

"Freedom!" said Virgie, wanderingly; "have I come to it?" She fell upon the rag carpet before the fire, saying, "Father, dear father," and did not move.

"Well," spoke a man of large paunch and black snake's eyes, sitting there, "it's not often people in search of freedom walk into Devil Jim Clark's!"

"She is white," exclaimed a woman, looking compassionately upon the stranger, "and she is dying."

"No," retorted the man, "she is too pretty to be white. This is the bright wench Sam Ogg was seen with. She belongs to Allan McLane, and there's a reward of five hundred dollars for her, but she'll bring two thousand in New Orleans for a mistress."

"Hush!" said the woman; "you may bring a judgment upon your daughters."

"Joe Johnson is about to sail," remarked Devil Jim Clark; "he shall take her with him."

The girl had heard that name through the thick chambers of oblivion. She rose and shrieked, and rushed into the woman's arms:

"Save me, mother, save me from that man!"

The woman's heart was pierced by the cry, and she folded Virgie to her breast and kissed her, saying:

"She shall sleep in our daughter's bed and rest her poor feet this night—our daughter, James, that we buried."

The man's mouth puckered a little; he looked uneasy, and drew his handkerchief to his eyes.

"You're all agin me! you're all agin me!" he bellowed, and rushed from the room.

* * * * *

The wife of Devil Jim Clark was a pious Methodist, and, with her rich-eyed daughter, spent the next day at Virgie's bedside, hearing her broken mutterings for fatherly love and Vesta's cherished remembrance.

"Your father is out for mischief," Mrs. Clark said. "Jump on your saddle-horse, my daughter, and ride to the Widow Brinkley's, just over the Camden line. Tell her to send for this girl."

"Mamma, they say she's an abolitionist."

"That's what I send you for. It's a race between you and your father. Be with me or with him!"

The girl tied on her hood, took her riding-whip, and departed.

In an hour she returned with a tidy black woman, whom Mrs. Clark took into Virgie's chamber.

"My heart bleeds for this poor girl," the hostess said. "They say your son spirits negroes North. Mr. Clark says so. I do not ask you if it is true, but, as one mother to another, I give you this girl. She is too white to be sold. She looks like a dead child of mine."

"Bill is not due home till sunset. If she is alive by that time, he has just time to drive her to Mr. Zeke Hunn's vessel at the mouth of the creek, which lies there every trip one hour—"

"To let runaways come aboard?"

"I have never been accused of helping them, Mrs. Clark."

The trader's wife slipped a bank-bill into the colored woman's hand.

"Lend to the Lord!" she said. "I depend upon you to save us the sin of selling this girl."

* * * * *

There came to the little black house that lurked by the woods two riding-horses, and stopped at the stile.

"Wait here!" said the voice of Devil Jim Clark. "Will you take her if she is still delirious?"

"Bingavast! Why not? I'm delirious myself, Jim, fur it's my wedding-night. I'll rest her at Punch Hall."

The herculean ruffian coolly proceeded to prepare some saddle-ropes to tie his victim before him on his horse. He was interrupted by a woman:

"Come and see your work, Joe Johnson!"

Following up the short cupboard stairs, the kidnapper was pointed to an object on the bed, with peaked face and sharpened feet, as it lay white as lime, with eyelashes folded and the arms drawn to its sides.

"Take her to Patty Cannon now," said Mrs. Clark, "who is only fit for dead company."

"The dell dead and undocked?" the ruffian exclaimed, slightly shrinking from the body; "maybe she's counterfeited the cranke. I'll search her cly. But, hark!"

A wagon and hoofs were heard.

"Joe," whispered the woman's husband, "you're only four mile from Dover. Maybe it's warrants for both of us?"

"Hike, then!" hissed the pallid murderer; "the world's agin me," and he slipped away with his companion.

* * * * *

"Now, Bill Brinkley," the wife of Devil Jim whispered, as a tall, ingenuous-looking colored boy came in the room, "you are just in time. She has had laudanum enough to keep her still; my daughter powdered her; let me kiss her once before she goes."

As the woman departed, the black boy, looking around him, muttered:

"Whar is dat loft? I've hearn about it."

Some movements overhead in the low dwelling directed his attention to a small trap-door, and, standing on a stool, he unbolted it and pushed it upwards, whispering,

"Any passengers for Philadelfy? De gangplank's bein' pulled in!"

First a woolly head, then another, and next two pairs of legs appeared above.

"Take hold yer and carry de sick woman to de dearborn," the boy said, not a particle disturbed, as two frightened blacks dropped from the loft, with handcuffs upon them.

* * * * *

In the clear evening a wagon sped along towards the east, through the saffron marshes, tramping down the stickweed and ironweed and the golden rod, and, while the people in it cowered close, the negro driver sang, as carelessly as if he was the lord of the country:

"De people of Tuckyhoe Dey is so lazy an' loose, Dey sows no buttons upon deir clothes, And goes widout deir use; So nature she gib dem buttons, To grow right outen deir hides, Dat dey may take life easy, And buy no buttons besides.

"But de people of Tuckyhoe Refuse to button deir warts, Unless dey's paid a salary For practisin' of sech arts; Like de militia sogers, Dat runs to buttons an' pay, De folks is truly shifless, On Tuckyhoe side of de bay."

A sail was seen in the starlight, rising out of the marshes at an old landing in the last elbow of Jones's Creek, and hardly had the fugitives been put on board when the anchor was weighed and the packet stood out for the broad Delaware, her captain a negro, her owner a Quaker.

The girl was awakened by the cold air of the bay striking her face.

"Freedom!" she murmured; "it must be this. Oh, I am faint for father's arms to take me."

* * * * *

Was this Teackle Hall that Virgie looked upon—a square, bright room, and her bed beside a window, and below her stretching streets of cobblestone and brick, and roofs of houses, to green marshes filled with cows, and a river that seemed blue as heaven, which sipped it from above like a boy drinking head downward in a spring? How beautiful! It must be freedom, Virgie thought, but why was she so cold? Her eyes, looking around the room, fell upon a lady in a cap, reading a tract to a large, shaven, square-jawed man, and this woman was of a silver kind of beauty, as if her mind had overflowed into her heart, and, not affecting it, had made her face of argent and lily, milk and sheen.

"What sayeth Brother Elias, Lucretia?"

"He sayeth, Thomas: 'This noble testimony, of refusing to partake of the spoils of oppression, lies with the dearly beloved young people of this day. We can look for but little from the aged, who have been accustomed to these things, like second nature. Without justice there can be no virtue. Oh, justice, justice, how art thou abused everywhere! Men make justice, like a nose of wax, to satisfy their desires. If the soul is possessed of love, there is quietness.'"

"Yes," said the girl, from the bed, thinking aloud; "love is quietness. Will father come!"

She dreamed and heard and looked forth again upon the hill descending to the river, the stately sails, the farther shore, so like her native region, and asked with her eyes what land they might be in.

"Wilmington," said the beautiful woman. "This is the house of Thomas Garrett, the friend of slaves. When you can be moved, it shall be to the green hills of the Brandywine, where all are free."

"Hills? What are they?" mused Virgie, looking at her wasted hand. "Must I climb any more? Must I wade the swamps again? I know I have a father somewhere."

She dreamed and wept unconsciously, and told of many things at Teackle Hall, being, indeed, a little child again, playing with her little mistress, Vesta. The stars stood in the sky right over her pillow, and she talked to them, and some she seemed to know, as little Vince, or little Roxy, or Master Willy Tilghman, all playmates of her childhood; but ever and anon these vanished, and the young Quaker woman was reading again from the sermons of Elias Hicks, and the words were: "Love is quietness;" "Light only can qualify the soul;" "If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you."