hich suggested the
mummy of some Pharaoh, brought into a drawing-room on a learned
society's night. Vesta repressed a smile, rising through her pain, at
the gravity of the forester guest, who was about to demonstrate his
aristocracy through this old hat. It seemed to her, also, that the
portraits of the Custises, on the wall, carried indignant noses in the
air at their apparently conscious knowledge of the presence of some
unburied pretender, as if, in Westminster Abbey, the effigies of the
Norman kings had slightly aroused to feel Oliver Cromwell lying among
them in state.

The hat, Vesta perceived, was Flemish, such as was popular in England
while the Netherlands was her ally against the house of Spain, and,
stripped of its ornaments, was lengthened into the hat of the Puritans.

Vesta attempted to exert her liberality and perceive some beauty in this
hat, but the utmost she could admit was the tyranny of fashion over the
mind--it seemed, over the soul itself, for this old hat, inoffensive as
it was, weighed down her spirits like a diving-bell.

The man, without his hat, had somewhat redeemed himself from low
conversation and ideas, but now, that he brought this hat in and
associated his person with it, she shrank from him as if he had been a
triple-hatted Jew, peddling around the premises.

The obnoxious hat also exercised some exciting influence over Meshach
Milburn, if his changed manner could be ascribed to that article, for he
resumed his strong, wild-man's stare, deepened and lowered his voice,
and without waiting for any query or expression of his listener, told
the tale.

CHAPTER IX.

HA! HA! THE WOOING ON'T.

It was twilight when Meshach Milburn closed his story, and silence and
pallid eve drew together in the Custis sitting-room, resembling the two
people there, thinking on matrimony, the one grave as conscious
serpenthood could make him, the other fluttering like the charmed bird.
Vesta spoke first:

"How intense must be your head to create so many objects around it
within the world of a hat! You have only brought the story down a little
way towards our times."

"I began the tale of Raleigh out of proportion," said Milburn, "and it
grew upon the same scale, like the passion I conceived for you so
intensely at the outset, that in the climax of this night I am scarcely
begun."

"Yet, like Raleigh, I see the scaffold," said Vesta, with an attempt at
humor that for the first time broke her