system, and
soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream almost awake.

She saw Meshach Milburn, who seemed to have become a little, old-faced
child, reaching up to an older person, very like himself in features,
and taking a steeple hat from his hand. This older child reached back,
and took a similar hat from another, still older; and then the first two
vanished, and two old men were giving and receiving the hat.

Then nothing was left but the hat alone, which was a huge object with
fire belching from it, and by the flame a circle of wizards went round
and round in dizzy glee, all wearing hats of similar form, but higher,
higher, till they reached the sky and stars, and each was spouting
flames.

Among these riotous wizards she recognized the features of the tall
kidnapper and of Judge Custis; and Vesta, too, was there, and old Aunt
Hominy, all giving a hasty look of shame or sorrow or severity at her,
till she, fearing, yet fascinated, leaped into the circle, and danced
around and around with the rest, till her feet made a fiery path and her
head was burning hot, and finally she lost her balance, and fell into
the great hat, whose high walls, like mountains, surrounded her, and
nothing could she see in the bottom of the old felt tile but a little
grave, and peeping from it was the face of the murdered child the
kidnapper had taken away.

"Come," said a voice, and Virgie awoke, with fever in her temples and
hot hands, to see the head of her conductor looking into the loft as if
with red-hot eyeballs.

She only knew that she was going again in the old wagon, and a boy was
in it, and that after a certain time, she could not tell how long, she
was helped to the ground at an old landing, where the road stopped, and
was placed on board a sort of scow, which the breeze, laden with
mosquitoes, was carrying into a broad, islet-sprinkled water.

The man Hudson was sounding, and was watching the sail, while the boy
steered, and Virgie was lying, sick and cold, in the middle of the
skiff, covered with the man's large coat.

It seemed to her to be afternoon, and the ocean somewhere near, as she
heard low thunder, like breaking waves; and once, when she rose, in a
stupefied way, to look, there were familiar objects on both shores, and
she thought it was the Old Town beach near Snow Hill inlet.

A little later the man brought her oysters and some cold pork-rib, with
corn-bread, to eat, and the shores grew closer, and finally