rnished their farms with
women's hands, and sent their long bowed teams to market on as many
turnpikes as the Chesapeake had rivers.

At morning Vesta looked upon the fleet of little sail lying in the basin
of the city, among larger ships and arks and barges, and saw Federal
Hill's red clay rising a hundred feet above the piers, and the spotless
monument to Washington resting its base as high above the tide, on a
nearly naked bluff. The rich sunrise fell on the streaked flag of the
republic at the mast on Fort McHenry, and the garrison band was playing
the very anthem that lawyer Key had written in the elation of victory,
though a prisoner in the enemy's hands. Alas! how many a prisoner in
the enemy's hands was doing tribute to that flag from cotton-field and
rice-swamp, tobacco land and corn-row, pouring the poetry of his loyalty
and toil to the very emblem of his degradation!

Vesta heard, with both satisfaction and sorrow, at Barnum's Hotel that
her husband was too ill to attend the funeral, and must keep his room
and fire; she needed his comfort and devotion in her sorrow, but upon
her dead mother's bier seemed to stand the injunction against that
fateful hat he had brought with him; and yet she pitied him that he must
stay alone, unknown, unrelated, chattering with the chill or burning
without complaint.

"God send you sympathy from the angels like you, my darling!" Milburn
said. "I know what it is to lose a mother."

Escorts in plenty waited on Vesta, but she wished she could find some
kinsman of her husband, if ever so poor, to take his arm to the church
and burial-ground; and at the news that her uncle Allan McLane had not
arrived, and would not, probably, now be present, she felt another
blending of relief and apprehension, because her husband might not
to-day be exasperated by him, yet his relations to her mother's property
would still remain unknown,--and Vesta feared for Virgie.

In the same impulse which had made her retain Teackle Hall, to secure it
against her father's careless business methods, she had made Virgie over
to her mother, to place her, apparently, farther from danger, never
supposing that in those prudent hands the enemy might insinuate; but
Death, the deathless enemy, was filching everywhere, and though she
could not see why Virgie could be persecuted, Vesta now wished she had
set her free.

The girl belonged to her mother's estate: suppose Allan McLane was the
administrator of it? Su