"Aunty, don't think I have no principle. Indeed, I have some."
Annapolis, half a century the senior of Baltimore, and the first town to take root in all the Chesapeake land, was now almost one hundred and fifty years old, and the stern monument of Cromwell's protectorate. Its handful of expelled Puritans from Virginia, compelled to organize their county under the name of the Romanist, Anne Arundel, unfurled the standard of the Commonwealth, reddened with a tyrant king's blood, against the invading army of Lord Baltimore, and, shouting "God is our strength: fall on, men!" annihilated feudal Maryland, never to revive; and, after King William's similar revolution in England, "Providence town" took his queen sister's name, Annapolis, like Princess Anne across the bay.
Annapolis became a place of fashion and of court, with horse-races, stage-playing, a press, a club, fox-hunting clergymen, a grand state-house, the town residences of planters, the belles of Maryland, and the seat of war against the French, the British crown, and the slaveholders' insurrection.
It was now in a state of comfortable decline, having yielded to Baltimore and to Washington its once superior influence and society; but a lobby, the first in magnitude ever seen in this province, had assembled in the name of canals and railroads to compete for the bonded aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of the Eastern Shore for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the cormorant, Baltimore.
Judge Custis was instructed to lobby at Annapolis for one million dollars, or only one-eighth part of the grants made by the state, and he was to draw on Meshach Milburn for funds, who, meantime, continued out of his private resources to grade and buy right of way for one hundred and thirty miles of railroad.
The adventure was gigantic for the private capital of that day, and the unpopularity of the adventurer at home was soon testified at the state capital.
Vesta, whose carriage had been brought over, looked with a gentle patriotism—being herself of divided Maryland and Virginia sympathies—upon the little peninsulated capital, with its old roomy houses of colonial brick, its circles and triangles in the public ways, and the unchanged names of such streets as King George, Prince George, and the Duke of Gloucester; but Rhoda was excited to the height of state pride in everything she saw, and, with strong faculty, seized on the historical and political relations of Annapolis, till Judge Custis said:
"Vesta, that girl is of the old rebel Milburn stock, I know. She takes it all in like a wild duck diving for the bay celery."
With two such beautiful women to speak for it, the Eastern Shore railroad seemed at first to have many friends, but it was not in the nature of the enterprising elements about Baltimore to yield a point, however complaisant they might appear.