e he was,
perhaps when I came away."

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

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

A muffled sound escaped the sober old gentleman of Delaware.

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

The old Chancellor looked up.

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

"Impossible!" Judge Custis said.

"Yes, sir; I married his sister."

The old Chancellor again turned his eyes to the ground.

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

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

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

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