John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man all his life.

He sued his successor and fellow New-Yorker, Engineer Wright, and was nonsuited. He garnisheed the canal officers, and beset the Legislature for remedial legislation, and threatened Clayton himself with damages; yet had such a fund of experience and such vitality that he kept the outer public beaten up, like the driving of wild beasts into the circle of the hunters. He had surveyed the great city of New York and planned its streets above the new City Hall. Elevated railroads were his projection half a century before they came about. He now looked upon engineering with indifference, and considered himself to have been born for the law.

In the midst of many other duties, Clayton, in course of time, convicted Whitecar of kidnapping, on negro testimony, having obtained a ruling to that end from his cousin, the chief-justice; and a constituent named Sorden (not the personage of our tale), being prosecuted for kidnapping, in order to spite Clayton, was cleared by him at Georgetown after a marvellous exhibition of jury eloquence, and repaid the obligation, years after our story closes, by breaking a party dead-lock in the Legislature of Delaware, where he became a member, and sending Mr. Clayton for the fourth time to the American senate.

* * * * *

The Entailed Hat became more common in the streets of Annapolis than it had been in Princess Anne, as Milburn pressed his bill for assistance year after year, and was shot through the back with slanders from home and hustled in front by overwhelming opposition.

Judge Custis took the field for Congress on the railroad issue, and was elected, through the Forest vote, and his wife went through a Washington season with as much dignity as enjoyment, few suspecting that she was not the Judge's social equal.

The ancestral hat defied all worldly hostility, but became the iron helmet to bend its wearer's back. He prayed in secret for some pitying angel to break the spell that bound him to it, but none conceived that he would let it go.

His boy grew strong, and took his father's dress to be a matter of course; his wife pressed upon him the nauseous ornament he had so long affected; a wide conspiracy seemed to have been formed to drive his head into that hereditary wigwam, and he could not escape it.

Even Grandmother Tilghman, who now was an inmate of Teackle Hall, in William's absence of years, forgot all about the queer hat, and rejoiced to herself that "Bill" had not married "that political girl."

Milburn had maintained his financial solvency by turns and sorties that even his enemies admired, but a railroad built along one man's spine and terminated by a steeple depot on his head must wear out the unrelieved individual at last.

The banks in Baltimore began to break; fierce riots ensued; the state debt had mounted up, through aid to public works, to fifteen million dollars; the Eastern Shore Railroad obtained, too late, the vote of the subsidy expected, and the state treasurer could not find funds to pay it.