e the plants to rain.

"I have found a friend, Captain," the boy spoke, after several minutes,
but not looking up; "I feel you cry."

"_Chito! chito!_" lisped Van Dorn; "here is Punch Hall."

Levin raised his head, and saw nothing but an old house standing in the
trees, with a little faint light streaming from the door, and heard the
low hilarity of drinking men. The whole band poured out to receive Van
Dorn's commands.

"One hour here to feed and rest!" Van Dorn exclaimed. "Let those sleep
who can. Let any straggle or riot who dare!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

PEACH BLUSH.

Judge Custis, whom we left riding out of Princess Anne on Sunday
afternoon, kept straight north, crossed the bottom of Delaware in the
early evening, and went to bed at Laurel, on Broad Creek, a few miles
south of Cannon's Ferry.

At daylight he was ahorse again, scarcely stiff from his exertion, and
feeling the rising joys of a stomach and brain becoming clearer than for
years, of all the forms of alcohol. His mind had been bathed in sleep
and temperance, the two great physicians, and wiped dry, like the feet
of the Prince of sufferers, with women's hairs. Exercise, natural to a
Virginian, awakened his flowing spirits again, and he fancied the air
grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any
perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he
turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp--the counterbalance
of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia--receded from the Chesapeake waters, and
approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered
the court-house cluster of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred
people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation
before, or about ten years after the independence of the country.

It was a level place of shingle-boarded houses, assembled around a sandy
square, in which were both elm and Italian poplar trees; and a
double-storied wooden court-house was on the farther side, surrounded by
little cabins for the county officers, pitched here and there, and in
the rear was a jail of two stories, with family apartments below, and
the dungeon window, the debtors' room, and a family bedroom above; and
near the jail and court-house stood the whipping-post, like a dismantled
pump, with a pillory floor some feet above the ground.

Young maples, mulberry and tulip trees, and ailanthuses grew bravely to
make shade along the two streets