At Cambridge, which basked upon the waters like an English Venice, he applied the sinews of war to a listless public sentiment, and the county press began to call for Joe Johnson's expulsion, and Patty Cannon's rendition to the State of Delaware. At Easton, lying between the waters on her treasures of marl, like a pearl oyster, the people turned out to see the little man in the peaked hat, with the beautiful lady at his side; and Vesta was more pained for her husband than herself, to feel that his outre dress was prejudicing his railroad, as business, no less than beauty, revolts from any outward affectation. At the old aristocratic homes on the Wye River, more scowls than smiles were bestowed on the eccentric parvenu; and at Chestertown, where originated the Peales who drew this hat into their museum, the boys burned tar-barrels on the market space, and marched, in hats of brown loaf-sugar wrappers, like Meshach's, before the dwelling of Vesta's host.

The greater the opposition, the more indomitable Milburn grew to live it down. He wrote to her father to go to Annapolis and work for a railroad charter and state aid, and began grading for his line in the vicinity of his old store at Princess Anne, throwing the first shovelful of earth himself, with the immemorial hat upon his sconce. This time there were no shouts, and he almost regretted it, seeming to feel that jeers carry no deep malice, while silence is hate.

Loyal to her least of vows, and wishing to love and obey him in spirit fully, Vesta felt that his own good-nature was being darkened again by his obstinacy upon this single point of an obsolete hat.

He looked, in their evening circle at Teackle Hall, like a younger and knightlier person, in a modern suit of clothes, and slippers of Vesta's gift. His delicate hand well became the ring she put upon it, and, when he talked high enthusiasm and sense, and stood ready to back them with courage and money, Vesta thought her husband lacked but one thing to make him the equal of his supposititious kinsman, the democratic martyr in the seventeenth century, and that was another head-dress. She almost feared to broach the subject, knowing that an old sore is ever the most sensitive, and being too direct and frank to insinuate or practise any arts upon him.

She was embroidering an evening-cap of velvet for him one day when Mrs. Tilghman sent a hat-box, and in it was a fine new hat of the current style. He answered her letter politely, and put the new hat upon the rack of Teackle Hall, and never touched it again.

Next, Rhoda Holland, his niece, procuring, from some country beau, a beaver-skin - and beavers were growing scarce and dear in that peninsula - had him an elegant cap made of it for the cold weather now coming; but he only kissed her and put it on the rack, and there it tempted the moth.