which pierced the square, and the four
streets which were parallel to its sides--pretty lanes being inserted
between, to which the loamy gardens ran; and, as the Judge stopped at
the tavern near the court, he was told it was "returning day," and the
place would soon be filled with constituents assembling to hear how
"she'd gone"--_she_, as the Judge knew well, meaning Sussex County, and
"gone" intimating her decision expressed at the polls.

"She's gone for Adams an' Clayton, ain't she, Jonathan Torbert?" asked
the innkeeper.

"Yes," spoke a plain, religious-looking man, the teller of the bank;
"Johnny Clayton's kept Sussex and Kent in line for Adams; Jeems Bayard
and the McLanes have captured Newcastle: Clayton goes to the senate,
Louis McLane to the cabinet, the country to the alligators."

"Hurrah for Jackson!" answered the host; "he suits me ever since he
whipped the British."

At breakfast Judge Custis recognized a gentleman opposite, wearing
smallclothes, and with his hair in a queue, who spoke without other than
a passively kind expression:

"Judge."

"Ah! Chancellor!"

The Chancellor was nearly seventy years old, wearing an humble,
meditative, yet gracious look, as one whose relations to this world were
those of stewardship, and whose nearly obsolete dress was the badge, not
of worldly pride, but of perished joys and contemporaries. His
unaffected countenance seemed to say: "I wear it because it is useless
to put off what no one else will wear, when presently I shall need
nothing but a shroud."

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

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

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

"Yes, to Dover."

"There is a sea