It was now in a state of comfortable decline, having yielded to Baltimore and to Washington its once superior influence and society; but a lobby, the first in magnitude ever seen in this province, had assembled in the name of canals and railroads to compete for the bonded aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of the Eastern Shore for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the cormorant, Baltimore.

Judge Custis was instructed to lobby at Annapolis for one million dollars, or only one-eighth part of the grants made by the state, and he was to draw on Meshach Milburn for funds, who, meantime, continued out of his private resources to grade and buy right of way for one hundred and thirty miles of railroad.

The adventure was gigantic for the private capital of that day, and the unpopularity of the adventurer at home was soon testified at the state capital.

Vesta, whose 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.