A man chooses his own verdict by a long course of behavior; austerity in the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment, is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the trap of his own temperament.
So Meshach Milburn never obtained the opportunity to relieve himself from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear, the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his tile—his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had pricked a cross upon his hand in India ink, and, growing to be a man with taste and position, sees the indelible advertisement of his vulgarity whenever he takes a human hand.
To have put on any other hat would have subjected him to new hoots and comments, and made himself publicly smile at his own folly; he must have climbed as high as the pillory to explain the change and make apology; the society he had faced in defiance seemed all at once united to refuse him a status without his Entailed Hat, and it would have taken the courage of throwing off a life-long alias and living under a forgotten name, to appear in Princess Anne in a new, contemporary head-dress.
Milburn saw that he must wear his old hat for life; he bent under the servitude, and was alone the victim of it now.
Chapter XLVII.
FAILURE AND RESTITUTION.
The railroad struggle was renewed from year to year.
The Legislature was annually beset by strong lobby forces, and an embittered contest between the Potomac Canal and the greater railway company, to strangle each other, left the Eastern Shore railroad out of notice. Locomotive engines of native invention began to appear; the railroad to Washington was finally opened, and, next, to Harper's Ferry, as Vesta's boy became a young horseman and learned to read. The venerable court-house at Princess Anne, with its eighty-seven years of memories, burned down during these proceedings, and a panic extended over Patty Cannon's old region at the whisper of another Nat Turner rebellion among the slaves; but no mention of the thousands of abductions there was made in the anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore, where Samuel S. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens nominated Mr. Wirt for President, because one white man had been stolen. The murder of Jacob Cannon by Owen Daw did produce some distant comment a little later, chiefly because of the apathy of the Delaware society to pursue the murderer.
By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had become detested in their own community, and when they sued O'Day, or Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled, and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw,—now a man in growth and of Celtic vindictiveness,—loaded his gun and started for Cannon's Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off the ferry scow.