He placed his finger
upon the crevices in the weather-boarding; he opened the little closet
below the stairs, and a weasel dashed out and shot through the door; he
ascended the steep, short stairs, and with a torch examined the black
shingles, but nothing was there except a litter of young owls, whose
parents had gone poaching. Then, returning, he searched on every open
beam and rotting board, as if for writing.
"They could not write!" he thought. "Nothing is left to me, not even a
sign, down a century and a half, to tell that I had parents!"
As he spoke he felt an object move behind him, and, looking back, the
shadow of the Entailed Hat was dancing on the wall. As he threw his head
back, so did it; as he retired from it, the hat enlarged, until the
little room could hardly hold its shadow. Retiring again, he lifted it
from his head with bitter courtesy, and the shadow did the same. The man
and the shadow looked each at a peaked hat and stroked it.
"This is everything," exclaimed Milburn. "The hundred humble heads are
at rest in the sand; one grave-stone would mock them all. But once the
family brain expanded to a hat, and that survived the race. I am the
Quaker who respects his hat, the Cardinal who is crowned with it; yes,
and the dunce who must wear it in his corner!"
Then the picture of his parents arose upon his sight: a cheerful father,
with two or three old slaves, ploughing in the deep sand, to drop some
shrivelled grains of corn, or tinkering a disordered mill-wheel that
moved a blacksmith's saw.
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