ng it home to honors and to
noble shelter. If you despise my hat, you will despise me."

"Oh, no; Mr. Milburn! I try never to despise anything. If you wore your
family hat from some filial respect, it was, in part, piety. But was
that, indeed, your motive in being so eccentric?"

Milburn felt uneasy again. He hesitated, and said:

"In perfect truth, I fear not. There may have been something of revenge
in my mind. I had been grossly insulted."

"Is it not something of that revenge which instigates you here--even in
this profession of love?" exclaimed Vesta, judicially.

Meshach looked up, and the shadows cleared from his face.

"I can answer that truthfully, lady. Towards you, not an indignant
thought has ever harbored in my brain. It has been the opposite:
protection, worship, tender sensibility."

"Has that exceptional charity extended to my father?"

"No."

Vesta would have been exasperated, but for his candor.

"My father never insulted you, sir?"

"No, he patronized me. He meant no harm, but that old hat has worn a
deep place in my brain through carrying it so long, and it is a subject
that galls me to mention it. Yet, I must be consistent with my only
eccentricity. Wherever I may go, there goes my hat; it makes my
identity, my inflexibility; it achieves my promise to myself, that men
shall respect my hat before I die."

"Pardon me," said Vesta, not uninterested in his character, "I can
understand an eccentricity founded on family respect. We were
Virginians, and that is next to religion there. The negroes of our
family share it with us. You had a family, then?"

Milburn shook his head.

"No; not a family in the sense you mean. Generations of obscurity, a
parentage only virtuous; no tombstone anywhere, no crest nor motto, not
even a self-deluding lie of some former gentility, shaped from hand to
hand till it commits a larceny on history, and is brazen on a carriage
panel! We were foresters. We came forth and existed and perished, like
the families of ants upon the ant-hills of sand. We migrated no more
than the woodpeckers in your sycamore trees, and made no sound in events
more than their insectivorous tapping. Out yonder beyond Dividing Creek,
in the thickets of small oak and low pines, many a little farm,
scratched from the devouring forest, speckling the plains and wastes
with huts and with little barns of logs, once bore the name of Milburn
through all the localities of the Pocomoke to and beyo