The next day a doctor took the author on his rounds through "the Forest," as a neighboring tract was almost too invidiously called, and through a deserted iron-furnace; village almost of the date of these wills.
Everywhere he went the Entailed Hat seemed, to the stranger in the land of his forefathers, to appear in the vistas, as if some odd, reverend, avoided being was wearing it down the defiles of time. Now like Hester Prynne wearing her Scarlet Letter, and now like Gaston in his Iron Mask, this being took both sexes and different characters, as the author weighed the probabilities of its existence. At last he began to know it, and started to portray it in a little tale.
The story broke from its confines as his own family generation had broken from that forest, and sought a larger hemisphere; yet, wherever the mystic Hat proceeded, his truant fancy had also been led by his mother's hand.
Often had she told him of old Patty Cannon and her kidnapper's den, and her death in the jail of his native town. He found the legend of that dreaded woman had strengthened instead of having faded with time, and her haunts preserved, and eye-witnesses of her deeds to be still living.
Hence, this romance has much local truth in it, and is not only the narration of an episode, but the story of a large region comprehending three state jurisdictions, and also of that period when modern life arose upon the ruins of old colonial caste.
CONTENTS.
| [Introduction.] | |
| [Chapter I.] | —Two Hat Wearers |
| [Chapter II.] | —Judge and Daughter |
| [Chapter III.] | —The Foresters |
| [Chapter IV.] | —Discovery of the Heirloom |
| [Chapter V.] | —The Bog-ore Tract |
| [Chapter VI.] | —The Custises Ruined |
| [Chapter VII.] | —Jack-o'-lantern Iron |
| [Chapter VIII.] | —The Hat Finds a Rack |
| [Chapter IX.] | —Ha! ha! the Wooing on't |
| [Chapter X.] | —Master in the Kitchen |
| [Chapter XI.] | —Dying Pride |
| [Chapter XII.] | —Princess Anne Folks |
| [Chapter XIII.] | —Shadow of the Tile |
| [Chapter XIV.] | —Meshach's Home |
| [Chapter XV.] | —The Kidnapper |
| [Chapter XVI.] | —Bell-crown Man |
| [Chapter XVII.] | —Sabbath and Canoe |
| [Chapter XVIII.] | —Under an Old Bonnet |
| [Chapter XIX.] | —The Dusky Levels |
| [Chapter XX.] | —Caste without Tone |
| [Chapter XXI.] | —Long Separations |
| [Chapter XXII.] | —Nanticoke People |
| [Chapter XXIII.] | —Twiford's Island |
| [Chapter XXIV.] | —Old Chimneys |
| [Chapter XXV.] | —Patty Cannon's |
| [Chapter XXVI.] | —Van Dorn |
| [Chapter XXVII.] | —Cannon's Ferry |
| [Chapter XXVIII.] | —Pacification |
| [Chapter XXIX.] | —Beginning of the Raid |
| [Chapter XXX.] | —Africa |
| [Chapter XXXI.] | —Peach Blush |
| [Chapter XXXII.] | —Garter-snakes |
| [Chapter XXXIII.] | —Honeymoon |
| [Chapter XXXIV.] | —The Ordeal |
| [Chapter XXXV.] | —Cowgill House |
| [Chapter XXXVI.] | —Two Whigs |
| [Chapter XXXVII.] | —Spirit of the Past |
| [Chapter XXXVIII.] | —Virgie's Flight |
| [Chapter XXXIX.] | —Virgie's Flight—Continued |
| [Chapter XL.] | —Hulda Beleaguered |
| [Chapter XLI.] | —Aunt Patty's Last Trick |
| [Chapter XLII.] | —Beaks |
| [Chapter XLIII.] | —Pleasure Drained |
| [Chapter XLIV.] | —The Death of Patty Cannon |
| [Chapter XLV.] | —The Judge Remarried |
| [Chapter XLVI.] | —The Curse of the Hat |
| [Chapter XLVII.] | —Failure and Restitution |