"Come see! come see! Meshach! he! he! sweet!"

"Now open the window yonder," said Meshach, taking the papers, "and let Tom fly out. He starts my nerves. Wh-oo-t, whi-it, Tom!"

The mocking-bird, spreading its wings and tail, and striking obstinately towards its master a minute, as he whistled, flew out of the window and settled in the old willow below, and had a Sunday-afternoon concert, calling the passing dogs by name, whistling to them, and deceiving cats and chickens with invitations they familiarly heard, to eat, to shoo, to scat, and to roost.

"If he regulates his wife like that bird," the Judge spoke to himself, "she will fly to heaven soon."

Milburn opened the papers, counted them, and handed them to his father-in-law.

"The papers will be plain to you, Judge Custis, after I have made a few words of explanation. You well know that the canal between the Delaware and Chesapeake is finished, and vessels are now passing through it from bay to bay. It is taking one hundred dollars a day tolls, and twenty vessels already go past between sun and sun, though the size of the shipping of the cities it connects has not yet been adapted to its proportions. It has been a cheap and quick work, costing something above two millions of dollars, taking only five years of time; and yet it has begun its mercantile life by a cheat upon a man to whom it is indebted as a promoter and contractor, and to whom I have advanced the means to compel justice and damages."

"Well, well, Milburn; I must pay tribute to your enterprise. The era of these great carrying corporations has barely begun, and you stake your little fortune against one of them that is backed by the great city of Philadelphia!"

"The canal passes through the state of Delaware, in which is three quarters of its little length of only fourteen miles, and there a suit will be free, to some extent, from the corruptions they might exercise in Pennsylvania; and, if successful there, we can more easily attach the tolls of the canal. I have no more faith in the Legislature of Delaware than of any other state; kidnappers sit in its responsible seats, and it licenses lotteries to make prizes of its own honor. But we shall try our case before a simple jury, which will be flax in the hands of one lawyer in that state, if we can secure him; but hitherto he has refused my contractor, and will not take the case."

"Why," said the Judge, "you must mean Clayton, the new senator."

"That is the man," Milburn continued, stopping for strength and breath. "He is finely educated, I hear, at the colleges and law schools, and possesses a remarkable power over the agricultural and mixed races of that small state, whom he thoroughly understands by sympathy and acquaintance. I heard him once in court, at Georgetown, wither and confound the confederated kidnapping influences of the whole peninsula, and, against the will and intention of the jury, prevail upon their fears and sensibilities to find a bold rogue guilty of stealing free men; of color - a rogue who was in this room, unless it is a delusion of my fever, this very day, and with whom I fancied I had been in collision somewhere."