ose carriage had been brought over, looked with a gentle
patriotism--being herself of divided Maryland and Virginia
sympathies--upon the little peninsulated capital, with its old roomy
houses of colonial brick, its circles and triangles in the public ways,
and the unchanged names of such streets as King George, Prince George,
and the Duke of Gloucester; but Rhoda was excited to the height of state
pride in everything she saw, and, with strong faculty, seized on the
historical and political relations of Annapolis, till Judge Custis said:

"Vesta, that girl is of the old rebel Milburn stock, I know. She takes
it all in like a wild duck diving for the bay celery."

With two such beautiful women to speak for it, the Eastern Shore
railroad seemed at first to have many friends, but it was not in the
nature of the enterprising elements about Baltimore to yield a point,
however complaisant they might appear.

Vesta did not go into general company, but her influence was mildly
exercised in her rooms at the large old hotel, and in her carriage as
she made excursions in pleasant weather to the South and West rivers, to
"the Forest" of Prince George and to the thrifty Quakers of Montgomery.
She wrote and received a daily letter, her husband being attentive and
tender, despite his growing cares, as he had promised to be on that
severe day he made his suit to her.

But the story of her sacrifice, shamefully exaggerated, with all that
intensity of expression habitual in a pro-slavery society whenever money
is the stake and denunciation the game, was used to injure her husband's
interests.

Mr. Milburn was described as a vile Yankee type of miser and
overreacher, who had plotted against the fortune of a gentleman and the
virtue of his daughter for a long series of remorseless years.

Local opposition affirmed that he would use the railroad to ruin other
gentry and oppress his native region, and that he was a Philadelphia
emissary and an abolitionist, scheming to create a new state of the
three jurisdictions across the bay.

Judge Custis, with his great popularity, did not escape censure; he was
said to have winked at the surrender of his child for money and
ambition, and to have broken the heart of his estimable wife after he
had lost her fortune in an iron furnace.

Senator Clayton, whose mother had originated near Annapolis, made a
visit there from Washington, and was entrapped into saying that Delaware
would furnish all nee