amson is
the only servant and watchman at Mr. Milburn's store, and he attends to
that disgraceful hat. If you can ever get it from him, Dave, and destroy
it, you will be doing a useful act, and I will reward you well."

The moody negro looked up from his remorseful, brutalized orbs, and
said:

"Steal it?"

"Oh, no, I do not advise a theft, David--though such a wretched hat can
have no legal value. It is an affliction to my daughter and Judge Custis
and all of us, and you might find some way to destroy it--that is all."

"I'll git it some day," the negro muttered; and drove into the old
tobacco-port of Vienna.

CHAPTER XXII.

NANTICOKE PEOPLE.

A map would be out of place in a story, yet there are probably some who
perceive that this is a story with a reality; and if such will take any
atlas and open it at the "Middle States" of the American republic, they
will see that the little State of Delaware is fitted as nicely into a
square niche of Maryland as if it were a lamp, or piece of statuary,
standing on a mantelpiece. It stands there on a mantelshelf about forty
miles wide, and rises to more than three times that height, making a
perfectly straight north and south line at right angles with its base.
Thus mortised into Maryland, its ragged eastern line is formed of the
Atlantic Ocean and the broad Delaware Bay.

The only considerable river within this narrow strip or _Hermes_ of a
state is the Nanticoke, which, like a crack in the wall,--and the same
blow fractured the image on the mantel,--flows with breadth and tidal
ebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Shore of
Maryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, the
one to the north continuing to be called the Nanticoke, and that to the
south--nearly as imposing a stream--named Broad Creek.

Nature, therefore, as if anticipating some foolish political boundaries
on the part of man, prepared one drain and channel of ingress at the
southwestern corner of Delaware to the splendid bay of Virginia.

Around that corner of the little Delaware commonwealth, in a flat, poor,
sandy, pine-grown soil, Jimmy Phoebus rode by the stranger in the
afternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shining
upon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birds
whistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.

The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, and
insects' eggs