shoes. I
recognized, too, a carpet-bag, a ninety-nine-cent affair, an "occasion,"
with galvanized iron clasps and paper-leather sides,--the kind opened with
your thumb.

The major--or, to be more definite, Major Tom Slocomb of Pocomoke--was
from one of the lower counties of the Chesapeake. He was supposed to own,
as a gift from his dead wife, all that remained unmortgaged of a vast
colonial estate on Crab Island in the bay, consisting of several thousand
acres of land and water,--mostly water,--a manor house, once painted
white, and a number of outbuildings in various stages of dilapidation and
decay.

In his early penniless life he had migrated from his more northern native
State, settled in the county, and, shortly after his arrival, had married
the relict of the late lamented Major John Talbot of Pocomoke. This had
been greatly to the surprise of many eminent Pocomokians, who boasted of
the purity and antiquity of the Talbot blood, and who could not look on in
silence, and see it degraded and diluted by an alliance with a "harf
strainer or worse." As one possible Talbot heir put it, "a picayune,
low-down corncracker, suh, without blood or breedin'."

The objections were well taken. So far as the ancestry of the Slocomb
family was concerned, it was a trifle indefinite. It really could not be
traced back farther than the day of the major's arrival at Pocomoke,
notwithstanding the major's several claims that his ancestors came over
in the Mayflower, that his grandfather fought with General Washington, and
that his own early life had been spent on the James River. These
statements, to thoughtful Pocomokians, seemed so conflicting and
improbable, that his neighbors and acquaintances ascribed them either to
that total disregard for salient facts which characterized the major's
speech, or to the vagaries of that rich and vivid imagination which had
made his conquest of the widow so easy and complete.

Gradually, however, through the influence of his wife, and because of his
own unruffled good-humor, the antipathy had worn away. As years sped on,
no one, except the proudest and loftiest Pocomokian, would have cared to
trace the Slocomb blood farther back than its graft upon the Talbot tree.
Neither would the major. In fact, the brief honeymoon of five years left
so profound an impression upon his after life, that, to use his own words,
his birth and marriage had occurred at the identical moment,--he had never
lived unti