dear
comforter's flight, and on her knees, praying for the delicate young
wanderer, she felt God's conviction of the sins of slavery. Alas!
thousands felt the same who would not admit the conviction, and gave
excuses that welded into one nation, at last, the sensitive millions who
could not agree to a lesser sacrifice, but were willing to give war.

A little note from Snow Hill told Vesta that her maid had already
departed, and would only write again from free soil.

So the upbraided hat was worn more often than before, and Vesta had to
suffer much humiliation for it. Her husband now moved actively to
organize his railroad, and visited the Maryland towns of the peninsula,
taking her along, and wearing on the journey his King James tile, now
swathed in mourning crape.

At Cambridge, which basked upon the waters like an English Venice, he
applied the sinews of war to a listless public sentiment, and the county
press began to call for Joe Johnson's expulsion, and Patty Cannon's
rendition to the State of Delaware. At Easton, lying between the waters
on her treasures of marl, like a pearl oyster, the people turned out to
see the little man in the peaked hat, with the beautiful lady at his
side; and Vesta was more pained for her husband than herself, to feel
that his _outre_ dress was prejudicing his railroad, as business, no
less than beauty, revolts from any outward affectation. At the old
aristocratic homes on the Wye River, more scowls than smiles were
bestowed on the eccentric _parvenu_; and at Chestertown, where
originated the Peales who drew this hat into their museum, the boys
burned tar-barrels on the market space, and marched, in hats of brown
loaf-sugar wrappers, like Meshach's, before the dwelling of Vesta's
host.

The greater the opposition, the more indomitable Milburn grew to live it
down. He wrote to her father to go to Annapolis and work for a railroad
charter and state aid, and began grading for his line in the vicinity of
his old store at Princess Anne, throwing the first shovelful of earth
himself, with the immemorial hat upon his sconce. This time there were
no shouts, and he almost regretted it, seeming to feel that jeers carry
no deep malice, while silence is hate.

Loyal to her least of vows, and wishing to love and obey him in spirit
fully, Vesta felt that his own good-nature was being darkened again by
his obstinacy upon this single point of an obsolete hat.

He looked, in their evening circle