An invitation came from Arlington House to Vesta, to bring Mr. Milburn there; and, as they proceeded out the Washington road in a private carriage, they observed Mr. Ross Winans's friction-wheel car, with nearly forty people in it, making its trial trip behind a horse at a gallop. At the Relay House, where the horses on the railroad were changed, Milburn remarked, gazing up the Patapsco valley:
"My wife, we are here at the birth of this little iron highway. If our vision was great enough, we might see the mighty things that may happen upon it: servile insurrection, sectional war, great armies riding to great battles, thousands of emigrants drawn to the West. We shall die, but generations after us this road will grow and continue, like a vein of iron, whose length and uses no man can measure."
The road to Washington was in places good, and often turned in among the pines. At Riverdale they saw the deer of Mr. George Calvert, a descendant of one of the Lords Baltimore, browsing in his park, and his great four-in-hand carriage was going in the lodge-gates from a state visit to the Custises. Passing direct to Georgetown from Bladensburg, they encountered General Jackson, taking his evening ride on horseback, and saw the chasm of the new canal being dug along the Potomac, and then, crossing Mason's ferry, they were set down at Arlington House an hour after dark.
The hospitable, harmless proprietor welcomed them into the huge edifice, half temple, half barn, among his elaborate daubs of pictures, and furniture and relics of Custis and Washingtonian times. He was nearly fifty years of age, of Indian features, but rather weak face, like one whose only substantiality was in his ancestors, and Vesta, placing him beside her husband, reflected that a similar inbreeding had produced a similarity in the two men, both of a sallow and bilious attenuation; but Milburn, beside her kinsman Custis, was like a bold wolf beside a vacant-visaged sheep.
Yet these men liked each other immediately, Milburn's intelligence and money, and real reverence for the great man who had adopted Mr. Custis, giving him admittance to the latter's fancy.
They strolled through those beautiful woods, one day to become a grove of sepulture for an army of dead, while Vesta, in the dwelling, talked with her cousins, and with the graceful Lieutenant Lee, who was courting Mary Custis.
It was a happy domestic life, and in the host's veins ran the blood of the Calverts, though not of the legitimate line.
It was suggested to go to the Capitol, and Mr. Milburn, growing daily better in the hill region, went also, and wore his steeple hat, greatly to the edification of Mr. Custis, who revelled in such antiquities. Vesta heard the ladies whispering, when they returned, that a parcel of boys and negroes had followed the hat, laughing and jeering, and had finally driven the party to their carriage. This, and her husband's impatience to return to his business, hastened their departure from Arlington.
They took the steamer down the Potomac, and, as they came off the mouth of St. Mary's River, Milburn donned his Raleigh's hat again, and stood on deck, looking at the lights about the old Priest's House, where the capital of Lord Baltimore lay, a naked plain and a few starveling mementoes, within the bight of a sandy point that faced the archipelago of the Eastern Shore.
"My hat," said Milburn to himself, "is old as yonder town, and better preserved. The Calverts and Milburns have married into Mrs. Washington's kin. Does my wife love me?"