te playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart
is bursting: what can I say?"

"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night,"
the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You
can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."

"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear
old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my
freedom, or die on the road to it."

"That is the spirit," the minister said; "we will buy it for you if we
can, but get it for yourself if you can do it."

He kissed her again, with the instinct of a father to a child, and
hastened to his horses and the hotel.

As Tilghman and Rhoda, at the earliest dawn, started for Princess Anne,
the young girl suddenly turned and kissed her minister.

"Thar!" she said, "I think you just looked magnificens last night,
sittin' behine them critters, like Death on the plale horse, an' lovin'
Aunt Vesty, though she's gone away an' quit you, enough to fight for her
pore, bright-skinned gal. I wish somebody would love _me_ like that!"

"So you could quit him, too, Rhoda?"

"Well, William, I likes beaus that's couragelis! You're splendid
a-preachin', but I like you better drivin' and showin' your excitemins."

"You are a beautiful girl," the clergyman said; "suppose you try to like
me better."

The great question, being thus opened, was not disposed of when they
reached Princess Anne, and quietly stabled the horses.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

HONEYMOON.

Meanwhile the steamer was taking Vesta and her husband across the
Chesapeake Bay in the night--that greatest, gentlest indentation in the
coast of the United States; at once river and sound, fiord and sea,
smooth as the mill-pond, and full of life as the nutritious milk of the
mother, and on whose breast a brood of rivers lay and suckled without
rivalry--the long Susquehanna, James, and Potomac; the short, thick
Choptank, Chester, and Patapsco; and, to the flying wild-swan, its
arborage looked like a vast pine-tree, with boughs of snow, climbing two
hundred miles from its roots in the land of corn and cotton into the
golden cloud of Northern grain and hay.

Upon one broken horn of this fruitful bay hung Baltimore, like an
eagle's nest upon the pine, seizing the point of indentation that
brought it nearest to the fertile upland and the valley outlets of the
North and West, where the toil-loving Germans bu