y in
the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment,
is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the
trap of his own temperament.

So Meshach Milburn never obtained the opportunity to relieve himself
from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor
who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear,
the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his
tile--his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had
pricked a cross upon his hand in India ink, and, growing to be a man
with taste and position, sees the indelible advertisement of his
vulgarity whenever he takes a human hand.

To have put on any other hat would have subjected him to new hoots and
comments, and made himself publicly smile at his own folly; he must have
climbed as high as the pillory to explain the change and make apology;
the society he had faced in defiance seemed all at once united to refuse
him a _status_ without his Entailed Hat, and it would have taken the
courage of throwing off a life-long _alias_ and living under a forgotten
name, to appear in Princess Anne in a new, contemporary head-dress.

Milburn saw that he must wear his old hat for life; he bent under the
servitude, and was alone the victim of it now.

CHAPTER XLVII.

FAILURE AND RESTITUTION.

The railroad struggle was renewed from year to year.

The Legislature was annually beset by strong lobby forces, and an
embittered contest between the Potomac Canal and the greater railway
company, to strangle each other, left the Eastern Shore railroad out of
notice. Locomotive engines of native invention began to appear; the
railroad to Washington was finally opened, and, next, to Harper's Ferry,
as Vesta's boy became a young horseman and learned to read. The
venerable court-house at Princess Anne, with its eighty-seven years of
memories, burned down during these proceedings, and a panic extended
over Patty Cannon's old region at the whisper of another Nat Turner
rebellion among the slaves; but no mention of the thousands of
abductions there was made in the anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore,
where Samuel S. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens nominated Mr. Wirt for
President, because one white man had been stolen. The murder of Jacob
Cannon by Owen Daw did produce some distant comment a little later,
chiefly because of the apathy of the Delaware society to pursue