Judge Custis, with his great popularity, did not escape censure; he was said to have winked at the surrender of his child for money and ambition, and to have broken the heart of his estimable wife after he had lost her fortune in an iron furnace.

Senator Clayton, whose mother had originated near Annapolis, made a visit there from Washington, and was entrapped into saying that Delaware would furnish all needful railway facilities for the Eastern Shore, and that two railways there would never pay.

Finally, Judge Custis wrote to his son-in-law to come to Annapolis and meet these misstatements in person.

Milburn came, and his pride being irritated by the nature of the opposition, he wore to the scene of the combat his ancestral hat.

He became at once the most marked figure in Maryland.

In one end of the state he was caricatured in drawings and verses as the generic Eastern-Shore man, wearing such a hat because he had not heard of any later styles.

The connection of a man of last century's hat with such a progressive thing as a railroad, seemed to excite everybody's risibilities. His railroad was called the Hat Line, even in the debates, and coarse people and negroes were hired by wits in the lobby to attend the Legislature with petitions for the Eastern Shore railroad, the whole delegation wearing antique and preposterous hats, gathered up from all the old counties and from the slop-shops of Baltimore; and in that day queer hats were very common, as animal skins of great endurance were still used to manufacture them.[17]

From Somerset word was sent that Milburn retained his hat from no amiable weakness or eccentricity, but because he had entered a vow never to abandon it till he had put every superior he had under his feet; and that he was a victim of gross forest superstition, and had made a bargain with the devil, who allowed him to prosper as long as he braved society with this tile.

The hotel servants chuckled as he went in and out; the oystermen and wood-cutters called jocosely to each other as he passed by; respectable people said he could have no consideration for his wife to degrade her by raising the derision of the town. Judge Custis finally remarked:

"Milburn, I resolved, many years ago, never to address you again on the subject of your dress. My duty makes me break the resolve: your hat is the worst enemy of your railroad."

Vesta, however, was the Entailed Hat's greatest victim. It lay upon her spirits like a shroud. Nervous and apprehensive as she had become, the perpetual admonition and friction of this article drove her into silence and gloom, poisoned the air and blocked up the sunlight, made going forth a constant running of the gantlet, and hospitality a comedy, and human observation a wondering stare.