as he went farther
north, while two letters received by the Widow Dennis were as mystical
as they were assuring: one, in a female hand, told her that her son
Levin was being tenderly watched, and another, in man's writing,
enclosed some money, and said her son would soon be home. Mrs. Dennis
was far from happy in this indefinite state of mind, and her heart told
her, also, that the absence of James Phoebus was a different strain.
She loved that absentee already too well to forgive his silence.

One day, before November, Vesta said to her husband:

"The air and sky are warm and sparkling yet, and the roses are out. You
work too hard between your canal case and your railroad. Let us fill the
two carriages and drive to old Rehoboth, and eat our dinner there."

He consented, and they took with them Grandmother Tilghman and William,
Rhoda Holland, Roxy, and Mrs. Dennis, and also the poor free woman,
Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus had released from her chains.

The road passed in sight of the birthplace of the lion of independence
in Maryland, Samuel Chase, who forced that hesitating state, by
threatenings and even riots, to declare for permanent separation from
England, as Henry Winter Davis, by the same means, eighty-five years
afterwards, forced her rebels against the Union to show their hands.

Near Chase's birthplace, on the glebe, rose the old Washington Academy,
out in a field, raised in that early republican day when a generous
fever for education, following the act of tolerance, made some noble
school-houses that the growth of towns ultimately discouraged. With four
great chimneys above its conical roof, and pediments and cupola, and two
wide stories, and high basement, all made in staid, dark brick, the
academy yet had a mournful and neglected look, as if, like man, it was
ruminating upon the more brutalized times and lessening enlightenment
false systems ever require.

"Ah!" said Vesta's husband, "how many a poor boy thou hast sent from
yonder mutilated for life, honey, like the lovers of the queen bee."

"How is that?" Vesta inquired.

"You never heard of the queen bee? Women, when they die, may turn to
bees, and reverse their hard conditions in this life. The queen bee has
no rival in the hive; all other females there are immature, and all the
males are dying for the queen. She has five hundred lovers, so lovesick
for her that they never work, and forty times as many maids, like
Penelope's, all embroidering co