skin like the wild plum's, and her raven brows and crown of luxuriant hair rising upon a queenly presence worthy of an empress's throne. Such beauty almost made Milburn afraid, but the energies of his character were all concentrated to secure it.
"Who are you?" she asked, with a calm, searching look, cast from her highest self-respect and alert intelligence. "Have you any relations or connections fit to bring here—to this house, to me?"
"Not one that I know," said the forester. "I am nothing but myself, and what you will make of me."
"Where were you born and reared?"
"The house does not stand which witnessed that misery," spoke Milburn, with a flush of obdurate pride; "it was burned last night, not far from the furnace which swallowed your father's substance."
"Why, I would be afraid of you, Mr. Milburn, if your errand here was not so practical. Omens and wonders surround you. Birds forget their natural life for you. Iron ceases to be occult when you take it up. Your birthplace in this world disappears by fire the night before you foreclose a mortgage upon a gentleman's daughter. Is all this sorcery inseparable from that necromancer's Hat you wear in Princess Anne?"
She had touched the sensitive topic by a skilful approach, yet he changed color, as if the allusion piqued him.
"Nature never rebuked my hat, Miss Vesta, and you are so like nature, it will not occupy your thoughts. I recollect the day you decorated my old hat; said I: 'perhaps this vagrant head-covering, after all its injuries and wanderings, may some day find a peg beneath my own roof, and the kind welcome of a lady like that little miss.' That was several years ago, and to-day, for the first time, my hat is on the rack of your hall. The long wish of the heart is not often denied. We are not responsible for it. The only conspiracy I have plotted here, was that I did not oppose most natural occurrences, all drawing towards this scene. My magic was hope and humility. I dared to wear my ancestor's hat in the face of a contemptuous and impertinent provincial public, and it gave me the pride to persevere till I should bring it home to honors and to noble shelter. If you despise my hat, you will despise me."
"Oh, no; Mr. Milburn! I try never to despise anything. If you wore your family hat from some filial respect, it was, in part, piety. But was that, indeed, your motive in being so eccentric?"
Milburn felt uneasy again. He hesitated, and said:
"In perfect truth, I fear not. There may have been something of revenge in my mind. I had been grossly insulted."
"Is it not something of that revenge which instigates you here—even in this profession of love?" exclaimed Vesta, judicially.
Meshach looked up, and the shadows cleared from his face.
"I can answer that truthfully, lady. Towards you, not an indignant thought has ever harbored in my brain. It has been the opposite: protection, worship, tender sensibility."
"Has that exceptional charity extended to my father?"
"No."
Vesta would have been exasperated, but for his candor.
"My father never insulted you, sir?"
"No, he patronized me. He meant no harm, but that old hat has worn a deep place in my brain through carrying it so long, and it is a subject that galls me to mention it. Yet, I must be consistent with my only eccentricity. Wherever I may go, there goes my hat; it makes my identity, my inflexibility; it achieves my promise to myself, that men shall respect my hat before I die."
"Pardon me," said Vesta, not uninterested in his character, "I can understand an eccentricity founded on family respect. We were Virginians, and that is next to religion there. The negroes of our family share it with us. You had a family, then?"
Milburn shook his head.
"No; not a family in the sense you mean. Generations of obscurity, a parentage only virtuous; no tombstone anywhere, no crest nor motto, not even a self-deluding lie of some former gentility, shaped from hand to hand till it commits a larceny on history, and is brazen on a carriage panel! We were foresters. We came forth and existed and perished, like the families of ants upon the ant-hills of sand. We migrated no more than the woodpeckers in your sycamore trees, and made no sound in events more than their insectivorous tapping. Out yonder beyond Dividing Creek, in the thickets of small oak and low pines, many a little farm, scratched from the devouring forest, speckling the plains and wastes with huts and with little barns of logs, once bore the name of Milburn through all the localities of the Pocomoke to and beyond the great Cypress Swamp. They are dying, but never dead. The few who live expect no recognition from me, and, happy in their poverty, envy me nothing I have accumulated. My name has grown hard to them, my hat is the subject of their superstitions, my ambition and success have lost me their sympathy without giving me any other social compensation. You behold a desperate man, a merciless creditor, a tussock of ore from the bogs of Nassawongo, yet one whose only crimes have been to adore you, and to wear his forefathers' hat."
"Is this pride, then, wholly insulted sensibility, Mr. Milburn?"
"I cannot say, Miss Custis. You may smile, but I think it is aristocracy."
"I think so, too," exclaimed Vesta reflectively; "you are a proud man. My father, who has had reason to be proud, is less an aristocrat, sir, than you."
Milburn's flush came and stayed a considerable while. He was not displeased at Vesta's compliment, though it bore the nature of an accusation.
"You are aristocratic," explained Vesta, "because you adopted the obsolete hat of your people. Whatever vanity led you to do it, it was the satisfaction of some origin, I think."
She checked herself, seeing that she was entering into his affairs with too much freedom.
"I suppose that somewhere, some time," spoke the strange visitor, "some person of my race has been influential and prosperous. Indeed, I have been told so. He was elevated to both the magistracy and the scaffold, but my hat had even an older origin."
"Tell me about that ancestor," said Vesta, the heartache from his greater errand instigating her to defer it, while she was yet barely conscious that the man was original, if not interesting.
He told a singular tale, tracing his hat to Raleigh's times and through Sir Henry Vane to America, till it became the property of Jacob Milborne, the popular martyr who was executed in New York, and his brethren driven into Maryland, bringing with them the harmless hat as their only patrimony.[1]
Before he began, Milburn drew up his compact little figure and opened the door to the hall. The wind or air from some of the large, cold apartments of the long house, coming in by some crack or open sash, gave almost a shriek, and scattered the fire in the chimney.
Vesta felt her blood chill a moment as her visitor re-entered with the antediluvian hat, and placed it upon the table beneath the lamp.
It had that look of gentility victorious over decay, which suggested the mummy of some Pharaoh, brought into a drawing-room on a learned society's night. Vesta repressed a smile, rising through her pain, at the gravity of the forester guest, who was about to demonstrate his aristocracy through this old hat. It seemed to her, also, that the portraits of the Custises, on the wall, carried indignant noses in the air at their apparently conscious knowledge of the presence of some unburied pretender, as if, in Westminster Abbey, the effigies of the Norman kings
