"Will you take this?"
"My father will not let me, sir!"
Meshach Milburn replaced the coin and said nothing else, but walked down
the streets, amid more than the usual simpering, and the weather-beaten
door of the little rickety storehouse closed behind him.
CHAPTER II.
JUDGE AND DAUGHTER.
Judge Custis was the most important man in the county. He belonged to
the oldest colonial family of distinction, the Custises of Northampton,
whose fortune, beginning with King Charles II. and his tavern credits in
Rotterdam, ended in endowing Colonel George Washington with a widow's
mite. The Judge at Princess Anne was the most handsome man, the father
of the finest family of sons and daughters, the best in estate, most
various in knowledge, and the most convivial of Custises.
In that region of the Eastern Shore there is so little diversity of
productions, the ocean and the loam alone contributing to man, that
Judge Custis had an exaggerated reputation as a mineralogist.
He had begun to manufacture iron out of the bog ores found in the
swamps and hummocks of a neighboring district, and, with the tastes of a
landholding and slaveholding family, had erected around his furnace a
considerable town, his own residence as proprietor conspicuous in the
midst. There he spent a large part of the time, and not always in the
company of his family, entertaining friends from the distant cities,
enjoying the luxuries of terrapin, duck, and wines, and, as rumor said
in the forest, all the pleasures of a Russian or German nobleman on a
secluded estate.
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