laimed, "They never shall see me hang, then!" and
swallowed the arsenic she had concealed in her bosom.

That night she died in awful torments.

* * * * *

The venerable Chancellor, lying in the hotel near the whipping-post
corner, watched by the released Mrs. Hudson, who must to-morrow depart
from the state forever, heard that night voices on the square, saying:

"Patty Cannon's dead. They say she's took poison."

A mighty pain seized the Chancellor's heart, and the loud groans he made
called a stranger into the room.

"Is that dreadful woman dead?" sighed the Chancellor.

"Yes; she will never plague Delaware again, marster."

"God be thanked!" the old man groaned. "Justice and murder are kin no
more."

They said he died that instant of heart disease.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE JUDGE REMARRIED.

Vesta found her circle reunited, though with many absentees, at Princess
Anne.

Aunt Hominy took her place in the kitchen, and cooked with all her
former art, but her voice and understanding were gone, and she never
would go past the Entailed Hat, and still regarded it, as nearly as
could be made out, as the cause of all her errors and dangers, though
she seemed to admit its unevadable dominion.

The poor woman, Mary, finding Samson Hat, in time, wishing to have a
partner in the old storehouse, where he had become the only resident,
had faith enough left to make her third marriage with him; and his means
not only made good the property she had lost, but the hale old man
presented her with a babe boy, which took the name of Meshach Phoebus,
and on which Judge Custis sagely remarked that it "ought to have been a
red-headed nigger, having both the fiery furnace and the blazing sun in
its name."

On Samson Hat's death, which resulted from rheumatism reaching his
heart, his widow joined her deliverer from slavery, James Phoebus, in
the West, where he lived happily with his bride and stepson, and often
wrote home of a friend he had there named Abe Lincoln, who made
flat-boat voyages with him down the Mississippi. Both Ellenora Phoebus
and Hulda Dennis reared Western families which played effective parts in
the drama of civilization.

Vesta lost no time in setting free every slave about Teackle Hall and on
the farms, with the approval of her father and husband also, and Roxy
became the wife of Whatcoat, the rescued freedman, and the replacer, at
her mistress's side, of poor Virgie, w