It was a wise friend who counselled us to begin our tour of the Eastern Shore at Eastville. By the Eastern Shore is meant the peninsula bounded on the north and east by Delaware Bay, on the south and east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Chesapeake, a quaint and venerable region containing about one-third of Maryland and two counties of Virginia. Bountifully endowed by nature, it is also, for the man who loves the past, a land of delight. When New York was yet a wilderness and Plymouth a virgin forest, men of English birth were growing tobacco, dredging oysters, and shooting wild fowl on the Eastern Shore. The descendants of these first settlers still follow the same pursuits. Moreover, locked away for the better part of three hundred years in this neglected nook, they cling with affectionate tenacity to the manners and customs, the traditions and modes of life, of their forefathers, so that one finds on the peninsula the indolent old-time existence and the broad hospitality of an earlier age, along with the careless air of ancient gentility, tempered and made piquant by an aristocratic exclusiveness.

And sleepy Eastville, near its southern end, is the Eastern Shore in miniature. Only during the last dozen years has it had easy connection with the outer world, and even now it feels but dubiously the intestine stir of modern ideas. Rows of white, low-roofed houses line its single dusty street, with two or three country stores and a couple of roomy taverns dropped in between, while a court-house and clerk's office bear witness to the fact that it is the shire town of the ancient county of Northampton. Eastville is the centre of a land overflowing with milk and honey, and above it and below it are the homes of people who in the golden days before the Civil War counted their slaves by hundreds and their acres by thousand sands, — old families whose ancestors date far back into the seventeenth century as men of importance and power.

Beside the inlets and rivers that deeply indent the shores of the peninsula stand the roomy dwellings of these old families outlooking over the bay, with lawns in front smooth as green velvet, dipping down to the water's edge. Such is the old Parker mansion, standing at the junction of two creeks, a fine old house surrounded by a thick cluster of trees, with large porches front and back, paved with marble slabs, and a long colonnade running from the kitchen to the main building. In these old dwellings the kitchen is almost always separated from the house, connected with it only by this covered way, thus securing coolness to the house, at the same time providing shelter from the rain for the dainty dishes, delicate yet simple, such as only the negro cook of the South can compound. Erstwhile the cook held absolute sway in her quarters, with a parcel of jolly, grinning little negro boys as pages. The mistress might rule the household and the master the fields, but in her own dominions, portly Dinah, with white teeth showing beneath her red turban, reigned supreme.

The name of Parker is repeated on every page of the early history of the lower Eastern Shore; and so is that of the well-known Custis family, high in social position and pride of birth, one of the later descendants of which was the first husband of Martha Washington. Arlington, the whilom seat of the Custises, faces the Chesapeake a dozen miles below Eastville, and is reached by a drive along a grass-grown road that never carries one out of sight of the placid waters of the bay. No vestige of the mansion remains; but near its former site are a couple of crumbling and weather-beaten tombstones that once stood, as is customary throughout Virginia, close to the old homestead. The inscription on the most elaborate of the two tells the visitor that beneath it lies the body of John Custis, who died “aged seventy-one years and yet lived but seven years which was the space of time he kept a bachelor's house at Arlington on the Eastern shore of Virginia.” On another side of the tomb is the statement, duly chiselled in the marble, that “the foregoing inscription was placed on this stone by the direction of the deceased.” The father-in-law of Mrs. Washington, if not an unhappy husband, was surely one of the most eccentric of men.

John Custis's tomb and its companion grave are the only visible reminders of the glory of Arlington, but it is an easy and pleasant task to recreate the vanished era in which it had its place. A hard-swearing, hard-drinking, hard-driving, — ay, and a hard-working lot, when the humor was on them, — were these men of the Eastern Shore, of a period when “the planter who had the most hoes at work was the best man,” — to every hoe a slave or a convict; when tobacco stood for all that was notable and characteristic in life and manners; when every large proprietor was in direct communication with England; when the ships of Bristol and London brought supplies directly to the planter's own wharf, and his eldest son, as well as his tobacco, was often shipped across in return.

The wives, sisters, and sweethearts of these dead and gone worthies were their comrades and competitors in the saddle or the dugout. Though they delighted to gossip of Chinese silks, brocades, lutestring, taffeta, sarsenet, ginghams, and camlets, — not forgetting pyramids and turbans, jewelled stomachers, breast-knots, and high-heeled shoes for the minuet, — they were also at home on the bridle-path and comfortable on the pillion; they rode to hounds, and were clever in the handling of a tiller or the trimming of a sail. Irving describes them as going to balls on their side-saddles, with the scarlet riding-habit drawn over the white satin gown. “In the flashing canoe, ticklish and fascinating, they maintained,” we are told, “the equilibrium of their bodies and their tempers with an expertness that was not ungraceful, and with a graciousness in which long training had made them expert. The dugout, dancing in the creek, waited upon their freaks and caprices with uses as frequent and familiar as those which pertained to the wagon or the gig, — to race in a ladies' regatta, or to run out to the old-country ship in the offing, with its pulse-stirring news of fashions and revolutions, battles and brocades, cloaks, cardinals, and convicts, sultana plumes, French falls, and the fate of nations.”

The spirit of the age was knightly, and the sword, not the purse, the symbol of distinction. When the Revolution came, the Maryland section of the Eastern Shore was warmly attached to the patriot cause; but in the Virginia counties of Northampton and Accomac the Loyalists were numerous; and one of the earlier episodes of the seven years' struggle was a small civil war on the peninsula. Dunmore, expelled from the mainland of Virginia, took refuge in Accomac, and soon had some hundreds of Tories under arms. The situation looked grave; but Matthew Ward Tilghman, chairman of the Maryland Committee of Safety, and his seven Eastern Shore colleagues proved equal to it. They promptly called out two companies of militia and suppressed the rising before the worst came of it. Afterwards the two victorious companies, with a third from the Eastern Shore, were embodied in Smallwood's regiment, the famous First of the Maryland line. Perhaps the most brilliant exploit of the Revolution was the stand made by four hundred of this regiment, under Lord Stirling, on the fatal day of Long Island. In six successive charges they beat back the greatly superior pursuing force of Cornwallis, and were on the point of dislodging him entirely when Grant, with nine fresh regiments, overwhelmed them by a rear attack.

The Second Maryland Regiment was wholly recruited on the Eastern Shore, while Pulaski's legion and Baylor's cavalry, besides several other organizations, also drew largely from the peninsula. It sent, moreover, seven hundred militiamen, under Gist, to the battles of Brandywine and German-town; furnished Washington with one of his most valued staff officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Tench Tilghman, and at the same time gave to the councils of the State and nation Cæesar Rodney, Matthew Ward, and his kinsman Edward Tilghman, William Paca, Thomas Ringgold, and other men of high character and unusual ability.

Though the War of 1812 revived the old military traditions, the golden age of the Eastern Shore went out with the Revolution. Slipshod and sluttish husbandry, that counted it cheaper to take up new land than to foster and restore the old, bore speedy fruit in mortgaged crops and acres, while the gradual substitution of wheat and corn for tobacco marked the increasing poverty of a soil worn out in its youth, and which sank from good to bad and from bad to worse. So things went on till sixty years ago. Since then they have changed for the better, and, though checked for a time by the loss of slaves and the turmoil of civil war, the upward movement is still in progress. Fertilizers have been introduced and improved breeds of stock. Machinery has taken the place of hand-labor in farm-work; and worthless fields have been limed and drained into fertility.

In other respects, however, the Eastern Shore remains unchanged, — a severed fragment of colonial America. The new-comer from over the seas has gone on to the cheaper and freer lands of the West, and the busy Northern man, as he hurries by, barely pauses to knock at its doors. And so the years, as they wax and wane, find the same population on the same soil, — a population composed, now as of old, of three classes, — the “gentleman born,” the “plain people,” and the negroes. Each class, save in exceptional cases, marries strictly within its own limits; and half a dozen surnames will frequently include nearly the whole gentry of a county, the appellations of present-day bride and bridegroom tallying exactly with those on the century-old tombstones of their common ancestors. Again, for the upper classes there is still but one church, the Anglican. They have listened in the same seats to the same service for generations, and, more often than not, they take the communion service from a chalice that was new in the days of the Restoration. Some of them can show ancestral souvenirs of the Martyr King. Easter and Whitsuntide remain universally recognized holidays, and antique observances still cluster around the minor festivals. Thus, freedom from change has made the Eastern Shore a land of serenity and dignity; but its confines are too narrow for youthful enterprises. It has no imperial possibilities, and must ever be a nook.

Mount Custis, an Eastern Shore Homestead

Proof of many of these things was before us as we drove to and from Arlington, and a little later set out from Eastville for a further exploration of the Eastern Shore. Our destination was the island of Chincoteague, on the Atlantic side of the peninsula, and the road led through the hamlet of Anancock and the sound of the same name, the latter a loop or skein of salt coves widening up between green mounds and golden bluffs, and terminating at an exquisite landing, where several creeks pour into the cove from the estates of well-to-do planters. Drummondtown, the county-seat of Accomac, was also passed on the way. Three miles beyond we halted for a half-hour's rest at Mount Custis, a roomy, rambling old house standing close to the shores of a creek, which, as its name indicates, once belonged to the masters of Arlington, and in the late afternoon found ourselves on board the tiny steamer “Widgeon” with Chincoteague in the eastern offing.

Outlying along the Atlantic coast and extending southward for more than fifty miles from the mouth of Delaware Bay is a narrow strip of sandy beach, its western side washed by the waters of a landlocked sound and its eastern beat upon by the surges of the ocean. Its southern end, called Assateague, is separated from the mainland by Chincoteague Sound, and lying within this sound is the island of the same name, only its southern extremity being thrust out from its snug hiding-place behind Assateague and exposed to the Atlantic. Yet at every turn the visitor to Chincoteague, with its gray-green waters and its far horizons, feels the majesty and pervasive presence of the sea. The air has a salty, pungent quality; all along the shore lie craft of one sort or another, and every grown man carries in his face the mellow marks of sun and wind, for the people of Chincoteague get their living from the sea, which affords them, directly or indirectly, not only food and drink, but clothing and shelter. Nobody asks alms, and want and theft are unknown. At the island's feet lie oyster-beds of wondrous richness, and any skilled worker can earn a living wage during nine months of the year. Winter, however, is the season of greatest activity, and then Chincoteague's fleet of oyster-boats is busy from sunrise to sunset. Early morning finds the oystermen hoisting sail; all day long they can be seen on the western horizon groping for the hidden treasure; and when twilight falls, scores of their little craft, beating homeward, make the harbor, facing the mainland, a snowstorm of canvas.

Truth is that Chincoteague is merely a standing-place and lodging-house for its inhabitants. The visitor discovers, to his surprise and delight, that it is also the breeding-place of a race of ponies unlike any other in the world. Some are watched and tended on private lands, but most of them, to the number of half a thousand, inhabit the common pastures at the south end of the island, whence, when the weather is bad and the waves high, scores of the little fellows are sometimes swept away and lost. Skirting the coast in a boat, one sees them feeding together on the pastures or standing knee-deep in the salt water, the breeze scattering their tangled manes. They are about thirteen hands high, nearly all sorrels or bays, and are fine-bodied and neatly limbed. The yearlings, which are never gelded, come through the winter with shaggy coats that are in rags and shreds before the summer is old, and still show tattered remnants at the yearly penning and branding in August. No one knows whence they came or how long they have inhabited the island, but as they have the head and eyes of the Arabian, the supposition is that the ancestors of the present generation came ashore from a wreck in colony times.

When we left Chincoteague and its contented fisherfolk it was to journey, by way of Berlin and Snow Hill, to Crisfield on the hither side of the peninsula. That intrepid sailor, Stephen Decatur, was born near Berlin, and Snow Hill has a peaceful history dating back to the seventeenth century, while Crisfield, facing the beautiful waters of Tangier Sound, has been aptly described as a town of oysters reared on oyster-shells. A man on building bent buys a lot at the bottom of the harbor, encloses it with piles, and then purchases enough oyster-shells to raise it above high-water mark. The product of this singular practice is a village which stands, as it were, up to its knees in the water of a little harbor that cuts jaw-like into the end of a small peninsula thickly flecked with the homes of fishermen and oystermen. Moreover, the railroad that runs through the length of the town, terminating at the water's edge, rests on a roadbed of oyster-shells as firm and solid as broken granite. Along the harbor front, and all built upon shells, are the huge, barn-like packing-houses in which centres the chief interest of Crisfield, — the shucking and packing of oysters for the Northern market. These come mainly from the beds of Tangier Sound, perhaps the finest in the world; dredging for them gives constant employment to a fleet of several hundred sloops and schooners, and the annual returns from the trade mount into the millions. In winter thousands of bushels of oysters are sent off from Crisfield simply shelled, drained, and pressed into kegs or cans; but later in the season they are canned in hermetically sealed tins, in which condition they will keep for years.

Crisfield and its oyster trade belong to the present. Tangier Island, across the Sound, is part and parcel of the past. Much homely matter anent this sequestered nook is to be found in “The Parson of the Islands,” a book dealing with the life story of a humble fisherman evangelist who labored with such effect in an unpromising field that to this day, when a flag is raised on the little island chapels, signifying “Preacher amongst us from the mainland,” the waters fill with canoes scudding down from every point of the compass. The island parson kept a canoe, called “The Methodist,” to haul the preachers to and fro, and in the second war with England, when the whole British army established a permanent camp on Tangier Island, and thence ravaged the shores of the Chesapeake, burnt Washington, and sought to capture Baltimore, this unpretending gospeller preached to them, and prevailed upon them to respect the immemorial camp-meeting groves.

Tangier, like Chincoteague, is a land of far horizons, of restless gray-green water, of vivid marsh grass, and of sweet salt air. Like Chincoteague, it is the home of a hardy, primitive people, who fear God and find no fault with their lot. The benevolent bay yields a living to all who are able and willing to work, and it is the boast of the islanders that there are neither drunkards, paupers, nor criminals among them. Less could be said of a more favored community.

From Crisfield a railroad — its route a giant interrogation point — runs by way of Westover, the centre of the berry culture of the Eastern Shore, to Cambridge on the Choptank. This stream is the noblest water-course of the peninsula, — at its mouth, a superb sound, curtained with islands, several miles wide; farther inland a net-work of coves and deep creeks, to whose beachy margins slope the lawns and orchards of many fine old homesteads; and Cambridge is a gem worthy of so exquisite a setting. A salt creek, bordered with snug old mansions of wood and brick, creeps up behind the tree-embowered town; and a clear spring rises under an open dome in the village square, which faces an ivy-covered court-house, while a little way removed from the business centre stands an old Episcopal church, garbed in living green and surrounded with mouldering gravestones carved with crests, shields, and ciphers.

There are a score of other objects in Cambridge to please an artist's eye, and another quaint and beautiful hamlet is Oxford, on the northern shore of the Choptank, where Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, passed the greater part of his boyhood. Threadhaven Creek — a perfect fiord, unexcelled by any low-lying Danish or Swedish marine landscapes — enters the Choptank at Oxford, and a few miles away, at the head of the same stream, nestles the quiet town of Easton. The road from Oxford to Easton leads past Whitemarsh Church, a dilapidated but picturesque structure dating back to the seventeenth century, and in an oak-shaded dell about a quarter of a mile from the latter place stands another house of worship which was already old when the republic was born. This is a Quaker meeting-house of antique design, which, according to tradition, once numbered William Penn among its worshippers. His followers still meet within its walls on First and Fifth Days.

Easton suggests in more ways than one the stately affectations of a bygone time; and nearby St. Michael's, at the mouth of Miles River, though now the chief depot of the oyster trade of the Middle Chesapeake, boasts intimate association with the great men and stirring events of the Revolutionary period. The ship-builders of St. Michael's have plied their craft for two hundred and fifty years, and when the eighteenth century was still young, vessels launched from their yards controlled the coastwise commerce from New England to the West Indies. The country bottoms of the Chesapeake traded with Liverpool and Bristol; smuggled for Holland and France, and when the Revolution came, turned to privateering and became as hornets and wasps in the face of the foe. The records show that in less than six years two hundred and forty-eight vessels sailed out of the bay — “and this with a British fleet at Hampton Roads and inside the capes all the time” — to fight and capture ships and small craft at the very gates of the enemy's ports, in the British and Irish Channels, off the North Cape, on the coasts of Spain and Portugal, in the East and West Indies, and in the Pacific Ocean. This record was repeated in 1812, when at least one Chesapeake privateer, the “Chasseur,” made a true viking's record. Armed with twelve guns, manned by men from the Eastern Shore, and commanded by Captain Thomas Boyle, she captured eighty vessels, thirty-two of equal force and eighteen her superior in guns and men. Boyle was born at Marblehead in 1776, married in Baltimore in 1794, and died at sea in 1825. He commanded a ship at sixteen, was a husband two years later, and made a dramatic end of a romantic and glorious career at forty-nine.

From either Easton or St. Michael's it is an easy and inviting detour to Wye House and Wye Island, — two storied shrines of the Eastern Shore. Called after the little river which rises in the Cambrian Hills, and mingling its waters with those of the Severn, flows out through Bristol Channel to the Atlantic, there are few American water-ways more lovely than the Wye. Its banks are free from the sombre borders of marsh which fringes most of its sister streams, and its channel, from head to mouth, sweeps between bold bluffs of woodland and smiling fields, dotted by the manor-houses of men and women whose ancestors dispensed stately hospitalities in these same homes more than a century ago. And nowhere, in those days of pleasantness and peace, had the stranger more generous welcome than was sure to be given him by the master of Wye House.

This sturdy domicile, built of bricks brought over from England, was burned in 1781, when a British marauding party looted the plantation and the mansion; but near its site stands another spacious structure, which invites the present-day wayfarer in the name of all the generations of gentle, kindly folk who have dwelt there since Edward Lloyd, in 1668, set up his son Philemon to be lord of the manor of Wye and master of Wye House. The main building of two lofty stories is connected by corridors with one-storied wings, presenting a façade of two hundred feet, looking out upon a noble, tree-strewn lawn, and over engirdling woods to Wye River and the island beyond. Behind the mansion is a flower-garden, and in the rear of that the family burial-ground, where is gathered the dust of many worthies and dames of the blood of the Lloyds. Here beneath a battered shield supported by mortuary emblems sleeps that Henrietta Maria Lloyd who had the hapless wife of Charles I for her godmother; and here, without a stone or a stake to mark the spot, rests all that was mortal of William Paca, thrice member of Congress, twice governor of Maryland, and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Moving memories also color the later history of Wye House, whose present gracious mistress is the granddaughter of Colonel John Eager Howard of Revolutionary fame and of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Eighty-odd years ago the steward or bailiff of the Lloyd estate was a certain Captain Anthony, of St. Michael's. This man was the owner of a negro boy who escaped from bondage, and became before middle age the foremost figure of his race. In 1881, Frederick Douglass, white-haired and honored of men, was moved to revisit the scenes of his childhood and his thrall, and one day found himself at the door of Wye House. The son of its master gave him welcome, and when he had made known the motive of his visit, he was conducted over the estate. Each spot he remembered and described with all its childish associations, — here a spring, there a hedge, a lane, a field, a tree, — and the whole heart of the man seemed to go out to the place as he passed from ghost to ghost as in a dream.

Then befell a strange thing. Standing mute and musing for a while, he said softly and low, as one who communes with himself, “Over in them woods was whar me and Marse Dan uster trap rabbits.” Marse Dan was the son of the whilom master of Wye House and Douglass's playmate in childhood. Thus, humor blending with pathos, was the ennobling lesson of an unusual life compacted into the homely reflection and phrase of a barefoot slave boy. Afterwards Douglass plucked flowers from the graves of the dead Lloyds he had known, and at the table drank to the health of the master of the old house and his children, “that they and their descendants may worthily maintain the character and the fame of their ancestors.”

Philemon Lloyd, first master of Wye House, at his death left to his only daughter thousands of fertile acres on the Wye. This daughter, by her marriage to Samuel Chew, a planter of ancient lineage and great wealth, who early left her a widow, added to her already large possessions; and one of her bequests to her son Philemon, when her time came to die, was the island of three thousand acres which faces both Wye House and the mouth of the Wye, and which he passed one to his two sisters.

Mary Chew became the wife of William Paca, and Margaret was wooed and won by John Beale Bordley, the descendant of an old Yorkshire family, the last of the admiralty judges of Maryland under the provincial government, and an earnest supporter of the patriot cause in the Revolution. No trace remains of the many-roomed house at the lower end of Wye Island, built by Samuel Chew of material brought from England, and long occupied by Judge Bordley and his family; but the mansion which Paca's son erected is still standing at the island's upper end, and promises to outlast another century. The Paca homestead crowns a commanding eminence, whence it looks down upon the narrows separating it from Wye House, and controls a view of long reaches of rich acres once the inheritance of the Lloyds and Chews, and still owned, to a great extent, by their descendants. The land naturally slopes downward from the river-bluff, but has been terraced up until it forms a broad plateau, sufficient to accommodate not only the house, but the garden which surrounded it, and which, with its extensive conservatories, was once a gayer paradise of shrubs and flowers.

Wye Hall, though fallen from its former state, gives ample evidence of its early grandeur. The building is in the Doric style, the central portion square, with spacious, II. — 3 lofty columned porticoes, and stretching away on either side are covered arcades, terminating, the one in the kitchen and offices, the other in the grand parlor or ball-room. This grand parlor is a beautiful and stately room, the high ceiling ornamented with handsome stucco-work and the walls hung with family portraits by the fathers of our native art. Among them is a full-length picture of Governor Paca. Painted by the elder Peale, and in his best manner, it shows a man of commanding presence and strikingly handsome features. The rich dress and easy carriage betoken high birth and breeding, the dark eye and well-chiselled mouth character and firmness.

The entrance-hall and corridors of Wye House are, likewise, noble apartments, and here, also, one wanders in the past. The Signer's solid and substantial bookcase, on the shelves of which yet stand the volumes of his law library, and the tables where he played short whist with his Revolutionary associates are still used by his descendants. Here, too, are the antique chairs which graced the executive mansion at Annapolis when Paca was governor, and which were loaned for use when Washington resigned his commission. The career of William Paca has been briefly sketched in another place. His last days were spent in delightful retirement on Wye Island, than which there can be imagined no more charming retreat for a man of wealth and culture wearied with the burdens of public life in trying times, and there he died in October, 1799. During his last illness “he conversed with perfect resignation on his approaching dissolution, and cheerfully submitted to sickness and death under a deep conviction of the unerring wisdom and goodness of his heavenly Father, and of the redemption of the world by our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. To the faith and charity of a Christian he added the civil virtues of a gentleman, "fond as a husband, indulgent as a father, constant as a friend, and kind as a master.” Such is the testimony of some appreciative friend, whose manuscript, without date or name to lead to the identification of its author, is preserved among the family archives at Wye Hall.

When we left Wye Island it was to board one of the steamboats trading to Baltimore, which weekly visit the bays and creeks of the Eastern Shore, and which carried us, during the early hours of a sunny afternoon, down the Wye and west across Eastern Bay to the lower end of Kent Island, where was established the first colony of white men on the Maryland shores of the Chesapeake. Kent Island belies its name, for it is, in fact, a peninsula connected with the mainland by a short and narrow isthmus, and in shape very like the hammer of an old-fashioned musket; and it has no ruins and no town; yet at every stage of the northward drive, past pleasant farms and fishing beaches to the mouth of the Chester, one is made to feel that he is riding over historic ground.

About a year after the landing at Plymouth Rock William Claiborne established a trading post at the southern end of Kent Island. This Claiborne, a man of enterprise and daring, was secretary to Sir John Harvey, then governor of Virginia. Obtaining a grant from Harvey, he claimed Kent Island and the bay for the colony of Virginia, and when the Calverts founded the Catholic settlement of St. Mary's, he disputed their jurisdiction over the Eastern Shore, and carried the question through the colonial and English courts. Defeated at every point, Claiborne resolutely maintained his ground, and when Sir Leonard Calvert came with an armed force, met him in the bay and completely routed him off Kent Point in what was probably the first naval battle fought in American waters. Then, taking the offensive in his turn, Claiborne marched into Western Maryland and swept Calvert across the Potomac into Virginia. In the seesaw of factions neither could long keep uppermost, for in 1646 Lord Baltimore's authority was reestablished on the Western Shore, the Eastern submitting to him at the end of another year.

Still, Claiborne's defeat was not final, for in 1653 he returned from England with a commission from the Puritan government then in power to reduce the royalist provinces about the Chesapeake. Lord Baltimore's rule was overturned, Kent Island restored to Claiborne, and a government selected by him established on the Western Shore. It retained control until Charles II., on his accession, reinstated the Calverts, with full power over the whole colony. Then Claiborne, deeming the contest hopeless, withdrew to Virginia. There he founded the county of New Kent, in memory of the isle he had struggled for half a lifetime to retain; represented his new home in the colonial Legislature, and ended by a gallant death at the Indian battle of Moncock a career that reads like a romance in even the barest statement.

In one respect, however, Claiborne's influence still abides on the Eastern Shore. When he first colonized Kent Island he brought with him from Jamestown the Rev. Richard James, a clergyman of the Church of England, who became the founder of the first Christian church on the soil of Maryland. This episode of Claiborne's Virginia chaplain gave the Anglican Church a permanent foothold on the Eastern Shore, for as the colony of the Isle of Kent spread gradually to the mainland, wherever it fixed itself the parish was organized, the church was built, and the magistrate's duties devolved upon the vestrymen and church-wardens. All traces of the structure in which James officiated have been long since lost, but more than one of the ancient churches that issued therefrom lie within the reach of a drive from Kent, by way of Queenstown and Centreville, to Chestertown, near the head of the beautiful river from which it takes its name.

The first churches built upon the mainland of the Eastern Shore were those of Chester and Wye. The ruins of the former, which was of extraordinary size, may still be seen near Centreville, while the latter, more gently dealt with by the years and the elements, occupies its original site on the Wye, its black-glazed bricks continually telling the story of its age to the worshippers who yet gather within its walls. Both churches were built between the years 1640 and 1650. Most of the old parish churches of the Eastern Shore, however, were erected between 1693 and 1700. The oldest of these later edifices which preserves its original shape and construction is that of St. Luke's, which tops a low hill, a few miles south of Chestertown, a square edifice, with apsidal chancel, heavy galleries, and spireless roof. The vestry-room is a detached building, with brick floor and huge fireplace at either end, suggestive of the dignified, ease-loving lords of the manor, who of old time administered the discipline of church and state.

Our zigzag tour of the Eastern Shore ended at Chestertown, an old place with a decayed college overlooking it, a loamy country round, and a broad and placid river laving its feet, but not before we had made visits to The Hermitage, a historic homestead facing one of the loveliest reaches of the Chester, which from the year 1660 to that of 1881 never passed out of the hands of a Richard Tilghman, and to the old church of St. Paul's, in the county of Kent. This noble relic of bygone days flanks the ancient thoroughfare which was, in Revolutionary days, the main line of travel between Annapolis and Philadelphia, and has counted seven generations among its worshippers.

A bold and curving stream sweeps close up under the shadows of the giant oaks which shade the church, and which must have been sturdy trees when it was built in 1693. The church itself is of the type before described, and around it lies a quiet God's Acre, kept bright with flowers and fresh with verdure by loving hands. The ground is sacred with forgotten graves, and the sexton's spade, when hollowing a bed for some new sleeper, seldom fails to turn out relics of the unknown dead. In such a church-yard might Gray have wandered as he framed the stanzas of his “Elegy,” and sight of this lovely resting-place, where, as the sun sweeps around his daily course, the shadows of the old church falls successively on every sodded bed, remains one of the lasting mellow memories of ten days of delightful strolling along the Eastern Shore.