ideration, almost imperceptibly. Sent
to Baltimore to be educated, her return was followed by suitors--not
youthful admirers only, but mature ones--and the young men of the
Peninsula remarked with chagrin: "None of us have a chance! Some great
city nabob will get her."

But the academy boys and visitors, and the townspeople, had one common
opportunity to see her and to hear her--when she sang, every Sabbath and
church day, in the Episcopal church.

Her voice was the natural expression of her beauty--sweet, powerful,
free, and easily trained. A divine bird seemed hidden in the old church
when this noble yet tender voice broke forth; but they who turned to see
the singer who had made such Paradise, looked almost on Eve herself.

She was rather slight, tall, and growing fuller slowly every year, like
one in whom growth was early, yet long, and who would wholly mature not
until near middle life. Her head, however, was perfection, even in
girlhood, not less by its proportions than its carriage: her graceful
figure bore it like the slender setting, holding up the first splendor
of the peach; a head of vital and spiritual beauty, where purity and
luxuriance, woman and mind, dwelt in harmony and joy. As she seemed ever
to be ripening, so she seemed never to have been a child, but, with
faculties and sense clear and unintimidated, she was never wanting in
modesty, nor accused of want of self-possession. Judge Custis made her
his reliance and pride; she never reproved his errors, nor treated them
familiarly, but settled the household by a consent which all paid to her
character alone. More than once she had appeared at the furnace mansion
when the Judge's long absence had awakened some jealousy or distrust:

"Father, please go home with me! I want you to drive me back."

The easy, self-indulgent Judge would look a slight protest, but at the
soft, spirited command; "Come, sir! you can't stay here any more,"
dismissed his companions, and took his place at the head of Princess
Anne society.

Vesta was almost a brunette, with the rich colors of her type--eyebrows
like the raven's wing, ripe, red lips, and hair whose darkness and
length, released from the crown into which she wound it, might have spun
her garments. Her eyes were of a steel-blue, in which the lights had the
effect of black. She was dark with sky breaking through, like the rich
dusk and twilights over the Chesapeake.

People wondered that, with such beauty, ease,