The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times

by George Alfred Townsend

"If that be true," Vesta said to herself, "there is no danger of this vociferous pet making his escape if I put him out of the window till I can see if his master speaks or lives."

So she raised the window, and flung the mocking-bird up into the air, and it came down and dropped into the old willow-tree beneath, and there set up a concert the Sabbath morning might have been proud of, when, in the corn-fields, the free-footed Saviour went plucking the milky ears. Vesta could but stop a minute and listen.

The liquid notes chased each other around in circles of dizzy harmony, as if angels were at hide-and-seek on the blue branches of the air, eluding each other in pure-heartedness, chasing each other with eager love, sighing praise and happiness as their supernal hearts emitted music in the glow of ecstasy, and carrying upward the loveliest emotions of the earth in yearning sympathy for nature. No language, now, that Vesta could identify, was woven into that maze of morning song, which challenged, with its fulness and golden weight, the floods of sunshine, matching light with sound, spontaneous both, and rivals for the favors of the soft atmosphere. Singing with all its heart, outdoing all it knew, forgetting imitation in wild improvisation, watching her window as it danced upon the twigs and fluttered into the air, conscious of her listening as it purled and warbled towards her, and sounded every pipe and trumpet, virginal and clarion, hautboy and castanet, in the orchestra of its rustic bosom, the mocking-bird's ode seemed almost supernatural this morn to Vesta, and she thought to herself:

"Oh, what wedding music in the cathedral at Baltimore could equal that? and this poor man receives it for his epithalamium, without cost, as truly as if nature were greeting my coming to him in the old poet's spirit:

"'Now all is done; bring home the bride againe;
Bring home the triumph of our victory;
Bring home with you the glory of her gaine,
With joyance bring her and with jollity:
Sing, ye sweet angels, Alleluia sing,
That all the woods may answer, and your echo ring.'"

Relieved from the agitation of the mocking-bird, Vesta now gave her whole attention to her husband; and the high heat of his brain and circulation, and his muttering, like delirium, seemed to indicate that he had an intense attack of intermittent fever. She heard the words several times repeated by him: "I will come soon, darling!" and the simplicity of his devotion to her, unloved as he was, had such flavor of pathos in it that the tears started to Vesta's eyes.

"Poor soul!" she said, "it will be long before I can love him. There, his hunger must be enduring. But my duty is not the less clear to stay by his side and nurse him, as his wife."

At this conclusion she looked Milburn over carefully, to see if any wound or sign of violence, whether by accident or an enemy, appeared upon him, and finding none, and he all the time wandering in his sleep, she climbed the ladder and peeped into the garret, to see if his servant might be there. Samson's bed, as she supposed it was, had not been disturbed, and so, descending, she raised the window over the larger door she had entered by, and beckoned Virgie to come up.

"Take this tin cup," she said to the quadroon, "and go to the spring, near here, and bring it to me full of water."

Then, as the girl tripped away, Vesta found a piece of paper, and wrote her father a note, telling him to come to her; and to the girl, when she returned, her mistress said: