VIRGIE'S FLIGHT.
Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered, willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.
Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of old Snow Hill in London.
Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian, which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling tide of blood; and Worcester was the name of the county, as the court and jail might tell.
Hidden in the sand, like Benjamin's cup in the bag of flinty corn, a golden lustre yet seemed to betray Snow Hill, as the sun rose into its old trees, and woke the liquid-throated birds, and finally made the old brick and older whitewashed houses gleam, and exhale a soft, blue smoke. Virgie heard a sound as of hoofs upon a bridge, and saw, across the lily-bordered river, the Custis carriage winding up a golden road.
"Alone!" said Virgie; "love has gone. Now I must live for freedom."
"Breakfast, Miss," spoke a neat, kind-faced, yet ready woman, of Virgie's own size and color; "my husband is going to drive you out of town before any of the white people are up to see you."
At the table was a mulatto man, whom the woman introduced as her husband.
"Mrs. Hudson," Virgie said, "you are doing so much for me! may the good Lord pay you back!"
"Oh, no," replied the woman, "I am always up at this hour. I work hard, because I am trying to buy my mother, who is still a slave."