ous girl threw her arms around him and kissed him in silence,
and, covering her face with her veil, awaited in uncontrollable tears
the steamboat that was to carry her to the mightier world she had never
seen, beyond the bay.

After she reached the steamer her stillness and grief continued, and
going to bed that night she turned up her face, discolored by tears, for
Vesta to kiss her, like a child, and faltered:

"Aunty, don't think I have no principle. Indeed, I have some."

* * * * *

Annapolis, half a century the senior of Baltimore, and the first town to
take root in all the Chesapeake land, was now almost one hundred and
fifty years old, and the stern monument of Cromwell's protectorate. Its
handful of expelled Puritans from Virginia, compelled to organize their
county under the name of the Romanist, Anne Arundel, unfurled the
standard of the Commonwealth, reddened with a tyrant king's blood,
against the invading army of Lord Baltimore, and, shouting "God is our
strength: fall on, men!" annihilated feudal Maryland, never to revive;
and, after King William's similar revolution in England, "Providence
town" took his queen sister's name, _Anna_polis, like Princess Anne
across the bay.

Annapolis became a place of fashion and of court, with horse-races,
stage-playing, a press, a club, fox-hunting clergymen, a grand
state-house, the town residences of planters, the belles of Maryland,
and the seat of war against the French, the British crown, and the
slaveholders' insurrection.

It was now in a state of comfortable decline, having yielded to
Baltimore and to Washington its once superior influence and society; but
a lobby, the first in magnitude ever seen in this province, had
assembled in the name of canals and railroads to compete for the bonded
aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of
the Eastern Shore for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the
cormorant, Baltimore.

Judge Custis was instructed to lobby at Annapolis for one million
dollars, or only one-eighth part of the grants made by the state, and he
was to draw on Meshach Milburn for funds, who, meantime, continued out
of his private resources to grade and buy right of way for one hundred
and thirty miles of railroad.

The adventure was gigantic for the private capital of that day, and the
unpopularity of the adventurer at home was soon testified at the state
capital.

Vesta, wh