bare-headed personage in brown cloth spotted with brass buttons. The major
was in search of his very particular friend, Mr. John Hardy of Madison
Square, and the personage in brown and brass was rather languidly
indicating, by a limp and indecisive forefinger, a route through a section
of the city which, correctly followed, would have landed the major in the
East River.

I knew him by the peculiar slant of his slouch hat, the rosy glow of his
face, and the way in which his trousers clung to the curves of his
well-developed legs, and ended in a sprawl that half covered his shoes. I
recognized, too, a carpet-bag, a ninety-nine-cent affair, an "occasion,"
with galvanized iron clasps and paper-leather sides,--the kind opened with
your thumb.

The major--or, to be more definite, Major Tom Slocomb of Pocomoke--was
from one of the lower counties of the Chesapeake. He was supposed to own,
as a gift from his dead wife, all that remained unmortgaged of a vast
colonial estate on Crab Island in the bay, consisting of several thousand
acres of land and water,--mostly water,--a manor house, once painted
white, and a number of outbuildings in various stages of dilapidation and
decay.

In his early penniless life he had migrated from his more northern native
State, settled in the county, and, shortly after his arrival, had married
the relict of the late lamented Major John Talbot of Pocomoke. This had
been greatly to the surprise of many eminent Pocomokians, who boasted of
the purity and antiquity of the Talbot blood, and who could not look on in
silence, and see it degraded and diluted by an alliance with a "harf
strainer or worse." As one possible Talbot heir put it, "a picayune,
low-down corncracker, suh, without blood or breedin'."