The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times

by George Alfred Townsend

Vesta's female instinct had already found the explanation of Wonnell's death.

From the moment of knowing her husband, his fatal hat had been the shadow across her life's path. His person had never been offensive to her, and something attractive or modifying in him had led her, when a child, to offer a flower to his hat, to give it consonance with himself, that seemed to deserve less evil.

A fancied insult to his hat had made him quarrel with her father, a quarrel which involved her conquest, not by wooing, but by the treaty of war. The same hat had inspired the superstition which led her kitchen servants to leave their comfortable home, and had been the insuperable obstacle to her mother's consent to her marriage. It had caused the only bitter words that ever passed between her and her father. At last it had spilled blood, and her uncle, she well knew, from his implacable nature, had set the ruffians on, and she knew as well that her husband had found him out.

His intelligence, which would have been otherwise a matter of pride to her, became a subject of fear, involved with his hat.

Then, the loss of Virgie was hardly less severe to Vesta than her own mother's.

It was true that Roxy, pretty and loving, now poured all her devotion at her mistress's feet, but there had been something in Virgie that Roxy could never rise to—a dignity and self-reliance hardly less than a white woman's. Vesta shed bitter tears at the news of that dear comforter's flight, and on her knees, praying for the delicate young wanderer, she felt God's conviction of the sins of slavery. Alas! thousands felt the same who would not admit the conviction, and gave excuses that welded into one nation, at last, the sensitive millions who could not agree to a lesser sacrifice, but were willing to give war.

A little note from Snow Hill told Vesta that her maid had already departed, and would only write again from free soil.

So the upbraided hat was worn more often than before, and Vesta had to suffer much humiliation for it. Her husband now moved actively to organize his railroad, and visited the Maryland towns of the peninsula, taking her along, and wearing on the journey his King James tile, now swathed in mourning crape.

At Cambridge, which basked upon the waters like an English Venice, he applied the sinews of war to a listless public sentiment, and the county press began to call for Joe Johnson's expulsion, and Patty Cannon's rendition to the State of Delaware. At Easton, lying between the waters on her treasures of marl, like a pearl oyster, the people turned out to see the little man in the peaked hat, with the beautiful lady at his side; and Vesta was more pained for her husband than herself, to feel that his outré dress was prejudicing his railroad, as business, no less than beauty, revolts from any outward affectation. At the old aristocratic homes on the Wye River, more scowls than smiles were bestowed on the eccentric parvenu; and at Chestertown, where originated the Peales who drew this hat into their museum, the boys burned tar-barrels on the market space, and marched, in hats of brown loaf-sugar wrappers, like Meshach's, before the dwelling of Vesta's host.

The greater the opposition, the more indomitable Milburn grew to live it down. He wrote to her father to go to Annapolis and work for a railroad charter and state aid, and began grading for his line in the vicinity of his old store at Princess Anne, throwing the first shovelful of earth himself, with the immemorial hat upon his sconce. This time there were no shouts, and he almost regretted it, seeming to feel that jeers carry no deep malice, while silence is hate.