rd that sings my name. What strength of
prepossession the master must have had to make the feathered pupil
repeat the sound of 'Vesta,' and call me 'sweet!' What resources, too,
without the use of money or social aids! He knows the story of our
English beginning, while we make it an idle boast; but to him Cromwell
and Milton, Raleigh and Vane, are men of to-day. Ah!" Vesta thought, "I
think I see now one of those Puritans in my husband, of whom I have
heard as sprinkled through Virginia. We are the Cavaliers. There is the
Roundhead, even to the King James hat."

As she was led onward in these probabilities, Vesta took up the demure
old Hat and looked it over without any superstition, and reflected:

"Do we not exaggerate trifles? Why should this man be so derided because
he covers his head with an old hat? What of it? Suppose it shows some
vanity or eccentricity, why is there more merit in covering that up than
in expressing it in the dress? The styles we wear to-day are the
derision even of the current journals, and what will be thought of them
fifty years hence, when the fashion magazines show me as I look,--the
envy of my moment, the fright of my grandchildren?"

With rising color, she put the hat in the leather hat-box, and shut it
up.

Judge Custis made his way up the dark stairs in a little while, and, as
soon as he looked at Milburn, exclaimed,

"Curses come home to roost! It was only night before last that I said,
in the presence of Meshach's negro, 'May the ague strike him and the
bilious sweat from Nassawongo mill-pond!' He slept by it that night,
while I was tossing in misery. The next night it was his turn. Daughter,
he has the bilious intermittent fever, the legacy of all his fathers. He
exposed himself, I suppose, extraordinarily that night, and I hear that
he burned the old cabin in the morning. Now he will burn, in memory of
it, for the next ten weeks; for he has, I suspect, from the time of day
the burning and delirium came, what is called the double quotidian type
of the fever, with two attacks in the twenty-four hours."

"Poor man!" exclaimed Vesta.

"Now I can account for his appearance at the marriage ceremony last
night. The fever was on him, but he went through it by hard grit, and,
probably, returning here to get some relief, he just fell over on that
bed, and his head left him for some hours. The paroxysm goes away during
sleep, and returns in the morning; so, before he could get abroad