Yet, I must be consistent with my only
eccentricity. Wherever I may go, there goes my hat; it makes my
identity, my inflexibility; it achieves my promise to myself, that men
shall respect my hat before I die."
"Pardon me," said Vesta, not uninterested in his character, "I can
understand an eccentricity founded on family respect. We were
Virginians, and that is next to religion there. The negroes of our
family share it with us. You had a family, then?"
Milburn shook his head.
"No; not a family in the sense you mean. Generations of obscurity, a
parentage only virtuous; no tombstone anywhere, no crest nor motto, not
even a self-deluding lie of some former gentility, shaped from hand to
hand till it commits a larceny on history, and is brazen on a carriage
panel! We were foresters. We came forth and existed and perished, like
the families of ants upon the ant-hills of sand. We migrated no more
than the woodpeckers in your sycamore trees, and made no sound in events
more than their insectivorous tapping. Out yonder beyond Dividing Creek,
in the thickets of small oak and low pines, many a little farm,
scratched from the devouring forest, speckling the plains and wastes
with huts and with little barns of logs, once bore the name of Milburn
through all the localities of the Pocomoke to and beyond the great
Cypress Swamp. They are dying, but never dead. The few who live expect
no recognition from me, and, happy in their poverty, envy me nothing I
have accumulated.
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