Talbot County
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Jail in Easton
When people outside of Maryland talk about the Eastern Shore they are generally referring to Talbot County, for that is where most of the strangers go. Like Dorchester on the south, most of Talbot lies under water. The tidal streams of this flat land twist, divide, and return upon themselves in such an extraordinary manner that the whole eastern part of the county consists of "Necks." Nearly every neck bears a fine old house, and these are the places that are bought by rich Northerners when the old families can no longer keep them up. Since the purchaser is well-to-do, the old house is restored in a more or less tasteful manner, and the grounds beautifully kept. There is, however, a tendency of the rich to keep on doing things to their places until they become stylized and quite lose their original charm.
Talbot is the county of station-wagons, of cocktail parties, and dashing sports clothes. Many of the new-comers bring intelligence and charm to the community but there are also those who merely sit beside their swimming-pools under striped umbrellas with iced drinks before them, waiting for somebody to come and relieve their boredom. However you look at it, the old serene Maryland life is dislocated. The county families, the gentry, cannot compete with the rich "foreigners;" their farm workers and their house servants are seduced away by extravagant wages; they begin to apologize for their shabby overgrown places so full of charm. One indignant Maryland housewife told me that her cook had been offered twenty dollars a week by a rich neighbor. Such fantastic wages do the Negroes little good; they become uppity; the whole comfortable relation between white and colored is destroyed.
Still more unhappy is the effect upon the young children of the Maryland families who cannot have cars of their own, racing sailboats, and beautiful clothes for every occasion, like the youngsters they go around with. The contrast is painful to the young. Also, the solid middle class of white people, so independent in other parts of the Eastern Shore, becomes demoralized. They turn their faces to the rich as to the sun and grow servile. All in all, Talbot pays rather heavily for the new citizens who bring such an air of prosperity to the county, who pay big taxes, and who contribute generously to local causes.
Not until a "‘foreigner" marries a native daughter does he really become a part of Talbot. I have such a friend in Easton whose point of view is illuminating. He loves the county and can appreciate its humors better than a native. He was elected a director in one of the Easton banks some years ago. The talk around the directors' table was curiously compounded of business and local gossip. Ought they to renew John Jones' loan? Well, it was reported that John's wife was running around with young Bill Smith, and John was looking worried so there must be something in it. Another director reported that Bill Smith, the darn fool, instead of concealing the affair, was bragging about it. Another indulgently pointed out that that was natural because Bill had never had a girl before, and folks were beginning to think there was something queer about him. So it went. Finally my friend protested. ‘‘Gentlemen, we are not here to discuss the affairs of the Joneses and the Smiths; we have a duty to our depositors to perform." "Now, Ed," said the genial President, laying an affectionate hand on my friend's shoulder, "we know you come from Chicago. Reckon you settled amongst us because you liked our ways better. Then why try to make us like Chicago?" There was deep wisdom in the President's remark. The new-comers flocking to Talbot in search of a better life have only succeeded in changing it.
Talbot was erected as a county so long ago that the date has been lost. The earliest reference to it as a unit appears in the appointment of one Moyses Stagwell as Sheriff in 1661. - The first burgess from Talbot sat in the Provincial Assembly of 1662. The county was named for Lady Grace Talbot, a sister of the second Lord Baltimore. In the first days all traffic was by water, and the eighteenth century was well advanced before their roads were anything more than woods trails. Such trails, when they led to Annapolis, were marked with two notches on trees at each side of the road. Church roads were indicated by a slit in the bark of the trees. Three notches in a line assured travelers that the road led to a ferry, and a courthouse road was indicated by three notches in a triangle. The first settlers were almost exclusively English, with only a foreigner here and there to bring an odd name into the registers. They were fighting men and patriots. The Stamp Act was hung from a gibbet in the court-house square until it was repealed.
Coming from the Annapolis ferry, one crosses the border into Talbot at Wye Mills. Here stands one of the famous trees of Maryland, the Wye Oak, estimated to be four hundred years old. It is eighteen feet thick at its base, rises ninety-five feet and has a spread of a hundred and sixty-five feet. It is, I think, the most beautiful tree I ever saw, not only in its majestic proportions, but in its rich leafage and youthful vigor. It spreads its great arms as in protection; one trembles to think of the destruction that might be wrought in one second by a bolt of lightning. Not far away stands Wye Chapel which was consecrated in 1721.
Easton, the county seat, serves as a shopping center both for the neighboring farmers and for the wealthy people from New York, Pittsburgh, and points West, who are landowners in the neighborhood. The latter element gives Easton a smarter and more sophisticated air than other Eastern Shore towns. The "foreigners" greet each other in a gay and assured manner at which the old-line Marylander looks a little askance. It does not seem quite real to him.
Easton is the only town on the Shore that I can recall at the moment which is not upon the water, though the head of navigation on the Tred Avon is not far away and the place has been a port of entry since 1803. For nearly a hundred years it was known simply as Talbot Court House. The courthouse dates from 1794, but, I am sorry to say, has been Victorianized.
The sight of the old building reminds me of an incident in the early career of Judge O'Dunne of Baltimore. A Negro named Fountain had been arrested in Talbot charged with rape, and O'Dunne, then a practising lawyer, accepted an assignment to defend him. Arriving in Easton, he found a yelling mob of five thousand men around the court-house demanding that the prisoner be handed over to them. Their anger quickly turned against the man who had come to defend him. "Go back where you came from!" they yelled at O'Dunne, adding lurid throats. "We don't want no Baltimore lawyer sticking his nose into our business!" At the conclusion of the first session of court, the police succeeded in getting the prisoner in safety from court-house to jail. Darkness had fallen and the jailer's wife, fearing the mob might shoot at the prisoner through the jail windows, put out all the lights. The prisoner, upon being brought into the jail, took advantage of the darkness to give his guard the slip and to escape through an unbarred window in the jailer's apartment. He got clean away.
The mob then threatened to wreak their vengeance on O'Dunne, but it was shown that he could have had no part in the prisoner's escape. The trial judge offered five thousand dollars' reward for the return of the prisoner alive and unharmed, to which O'Dunne added two hundred and fifty dollars from his own pocket. The jury was locked up to await the event. After two days the prisoner was captured in a swamp. When word of it got around, the mob reassembled at the court-house to wait for him. The judge for the case addressed them somewhat in this fashion:
"Men! We have grown up together in this community. We know each other. I know that you are good citizens and that you are going to let the law take its course. You will not allow a foul blot to be placed on the record of Talbot County."
At this moment the horn on the automobile bringing the prisoner was heard and a deathly silence fell on the crowd. Jumping up, Lawyer O'Dunne cried: "He's coming, men! I have not been brought up among you; the judge ought to know you better than I do, but I say he's wrong. I say you're not good citizens. I say you're determined to take this Negro's life. I say you're going to blacken the name of your county. Now let's see who's right."
The automobile drew up; the mob parted in silence like the waves of the Red Sea and let the prisoner through unharmed.
Fountain was convicted. O'Dunne secured a reversal from the Court of Appeals on the ground that the jury should not have been held throughout all the excitement. The Negro was subsequently tried at Towson in Baltimore County, convicted and hung. The affair cost O'Dunne two hundred and fifty dollars.
Easton is what is called a "pretty" town; that is to say, the streets are regularly laid out, the houses big and comfortable, the trees magnificent. Perhaps it is due to the influence of the Northerners that the place is notably tidier than is characteristic of Tide-water Maryland.
The most interesting sight in town is the Third Haven Meeting House, built by the Quakers in 1682 to 1683. It was the third general meeting-place or "Haven" of the Friends. Third Haven, corrupted in the course of years to Tred Avon, gave its name to the river near-by. The meeting-house is one of the oldest wooden places of worship in the country. In 1700, William Penn held a meeting under one of the massive oaks in the yard for a great throng which included Lord and Lady Baltimore and their retinue. The plain little building has broad plank floors and straight-backed benches. In 1781, the stove was a great source of contention because many of the members considered that religious zeal should furnish sufficient heat without a stove. The records have actually been preserved from the first meeting in 1683.
I read with great regret recently of the death of Judge Mason Shehan. One of my pleasantest recollections of Easton is of sitting under the tall trees in Judge Shehan's yard and listening to him ramble on about the great old days of Talbot, when every gentleman had a parlor full of company and a kitchen full of niggers; of the Lloyds, the Tilghmans, the Dickinsons, and the Chamberlaines. The right name of the latter family was Tankerville (de Tanqueville?). It appears that the Tankervilles in England were hereditary Chamber-lains to the Crown from the time of William the Conqueror, and the first of that name to emigrate to America chose to call himself Chamberlaine. Bonfield, near Oxford, now the property of Hervey Allen, was a Chamberlaine place as was also the stately brick house opposite the hotel in Easton. Here the last Chamberlaine died.
One of Judge Shehan's heroes was the late Colonel Oswald Tilghman whom he calls the last of the wits. Colonel Tilghman wrote a history of Talbot County. He was famous as far away as New York. Chauncey M. Depew was his friend and they vied with each other in after-dinner speaking. In Easton, Colonel Tilghman's pal was George Haddeway, another brilliant man, editor of the Ledger. As the Colonel was a magnificent figure of a man, the editor a queer stooping fellow, they made a very oddly-assorted pair. "All my friends seem to have been heavy drinkers," said Judge Shehan, sadly shaking his head. "They say it's worse nowadays, but I wouldn't know about that." Another shake of the head.
Whenever the Ledger came out the subscribers eagerly unfolded it to see what condition the editor was in. If the editorials were trenchant, the news complete, he was sober. If the columns were not filled out and obviously written by the printer's boy, everybody in town knew that the editor was drunk. It was a great sight on mailing day to see the sports lined up before a long trestle in the Ledger office addressing the papers, while the slam-bang press turned them out in the rear. "Did they do this just for friendship?" I asked. "No, for drinks,' said Judge Shehan. "When the work was done the editor passed out mint juleps in summer, or hot scotches when the weather was cold. When all else failed, my uncle Frank Wrightson could always be depended on for a bottle." Mr. Wrightson served as Clerk of the Court for eighteen years. His nephew finally suggested that he could be elected without buying whisky; he tried it, and he was.
Judge Shehan had a fund of Negro stories, too, not the synthetic kind. Slavery as practised in Talbot County was a beneficent institution, he said. The Negroes were fed and housed; they had nothing to worry about; even a mean man was impelled to treat his slaves well by the force of public opinion. When they misbehaved they were whipped; it was something a Negro understood. To put him in jail is a mockery of punishment. The whites having cleared and occupied all the "Necks" in Talbot, when the Negroes were freed they retired into the backwoods and built their little settlements, which still exist, such as "Stump-town," "Ivy Town," and "Rabbit Town."
Judge Shehan told of his friend Tilghman Johnson, for years a police justice in Easton. A plaster cast of Charles Dickens stood on his bookcase. One day his colored maid ran into him gray with terror. "'Fore God, Massa Tim, Ah done bus' you' grandpappy." A Negro appeared before Judge Johnson to complain that his neighbor, Virgil Watts, had stolen a pig. He explained that the day before he had four pigs and to-day but three; whereas Virgil had three yesterday and four to-day. "How do you know that the extra pig is your pig?" asked the Judge. "Jedge, I knows it, because he favor hisself." Judge Johnson made a practice of issuing "court orders" and they were obeyed, too. Clarence Brown was ordered to cease "housing" Mose Tandy's wife; Buena Vista Barnes was ordered to stop "switching" when she passed by Elvira Mearses.
There was Louella Tripp, a smart girl, who went down to Hampton Institute to get a diploma. She came home with a baby and no diploma, so they christened the baby Diploma. There is old Lizzy, who works in Judge Shehan's kitchen. She called the house man to account because he addressed his master as "Judge" just like white men did. "You call him Mister Judge," she said, "or you'll have me on your back." Lizzie's miscellaneous brood bears such intriguing names as Ginger Bread, Pussy Willow, and Muskrat. In the course of time Pussy Willow, a pretty, graceful little girl, produced a baby which she wished to call Mickey Mouse. The late Mrs. Shehan said this would not do at all. She had old Lizzie up in her room to discuss the situation, Old Lizzie opined that, "Pussy Willow, she think she know who was the baby's father." "Then he should marry her," said Mrs. Shehan firmly. Lizzy objected. "'Deed, Miss, Pussy Willow, she too young to marry."
It is characteristic of Maryland that Easton, the town which has no water-front, should be the home of the leading yacht club on the Eastern Shore. The Chesapeake Bay Yacht Club was founded more than half a century ago by the admired Colonel Oswald Tilghman. It has a fine clubhouse in Easton but has never possessed an anchorage; its annual regatta is held at Oxford. The club is chary about admitting new members; consequently, there is a burning desire to belong, and it prospers.
A dozen miles from Easton on a tributary of the Front Wye River which divides Talbot from Queen Anne's, stands Wye House, which for me is the first house on the Eastern Shore. It is hard to analyze the spell that it casts on the imagination; I think of a dozen houses that are more beautiful or more romantically situated, but Wye House stands alone. It presents its wide front as with arms outstretched in hospitality; it has been kept up in a dignified fashion but never slicked up nor "improved;" the ancient gardens are of a piece with the ancient house; in short, its tradition has never been broken.
Wye House has been the home of the Lloyd family for nine generations. The first Lloyd, Edward, came to Maryland from Virginia in 1649 along with Richard Preston and a thousand other Puritans, at the invitation of Lord Baltimore. Very soon afterwards the Puritans were in rebellion against Lord Baltimore. After the trouble was over and Baltimore reinstated in his rights and privileges, Lloyd came to Wye River to settle. His first quaint little brick house still stands at the edge of the garden. Later a mansion was built which stood until it was burned by the British in 1781. Some of the Lloyd silver was afterwards found in the possession of the royal family of England, who, when it was identified by the coat of arms, politely returned it.
The present great house was started by Edward Lloyd IV, immediately upon the departure of the British. It is a "five-part" house, that is to say, having a central portion with a wing on either side connected with the main block by a gallery or "curtain." The whole frontage is two hundred feet. The pedimented gable of the main house is repeated in the perfectly balanced pavilions. It is a wooden house, painted white; the detail of the carving on cornice and windows is exquisite. Inside, the rooms are of noble proportions, all those on the first floor having paneled over-mantels rising to the lofty ceilings.
From the back of the house a broad bowling-green enclosed within tall shrubbery is blocked at the far end by a beautiful building, unique in Maryland, the orangery. This is a stone building facing south, with huge small-paned windows giving the effect of a whole front of glass. It was, in fact, an eighteenth-century greenhouse; for nearly a hundred years oranges and lemons were grown here in square tubs patterned after those at Versailles. The Lloyds always lived in the grand manner; it is pleasant to read that they had a yacht to carry them back and forth between Wye House and their town residence in Annapolis. There is an old saying in Talbot that God never intended any man should own a thousand niggers, but Colonel Lloyd had nine hundred and ninety-nine.
On either side of the bowling-green lie the wide-spreading gardens, not too well kept up; the awful urge to balance each bush with another, to lay each leaf in place, has never prevailed here. I suppose they were formal gardens in the first place, but the formality was long ago outgrown. There is something about an old garden that makes the heart ache. Here and there new flower beds have been made within the old box, which is as it should be. The old gardener complained that about all he could do was to keep the box trimmed sufficiently for a person to get through the alleys. "I figure there is about three miles of box," he said.
Along the bottom of the gardens runs an ancient brick wall, a lovely thing in itself, and through an arched opening in it, one enters the family burial ground. I wonder if there is another place in this country where nine generations of a family lie in their own ground. The Lloyds are still brought here, wherever they may die. The changing styles of burial stones for two hundred and fifty years are represented: slabs, obelisks, and urns. The oldest date to be found is 1684. A happy mean has been established in caring for the spot so that it looks neither neglected nor offensively barbered. The exuberant trees are in keeping; the sprawling flowers have become naturalized.
I cannot even enumerate all the interesting houses in Talbot. A little off the road to Wye House lies Hope House with its curious ogival roof line, and near-by, Ratcliffe Manor, a house in the best tradition of the mid-eighteenth century, beautiful inside and out. The rich dark bricks are almost covered with English ivy. Off the road to Easton from the North, is Myrtle Grove, another beautiful house with an unbroken tradition. South of Easton are Crosiadore, supposed to be a corruption of "Croix d'Or" but more likely "Crosier d'Or," a Dickinson house; and nearby Compton, a dream of beauty with its rosy-colored brick, the same shade that you may see in the Grand Canyon. There is quaint Otwell which dates back to 1670; Pleasant Valley, for elegance and refinement distinguished even in Talbot, and scores of others.
The road west from Easton following the broad Miles River brings you in a few miles to St. Michael's, a village of highly individual character, which seems to turn its back on the all-pervasive water. To understand the nature of the country you need an air view; this shows how St. Michael's is almost surrounded by water; how every pair of flat fields is separated by a finger of shining water working inland.
At the foot of one of the shady village streets you leave your car and pass over a foot-bridge to what they call the "peninsula." It is the prettiest, oddest scene imaginable. On your right lies a little basin where the crab-boats are moored in a line with their prows to the shore; on the left, under ancient trees, three little houses with galleries, perfect Maryland specimens. The third and most picturesque has three tiered galleries, and a brick terrace also. Unfortunately the end of the peninsula is occupied by a cement-block factory and a crabhouse, not so picturesque. At certain hours it is agreeable to see the comely colored women crossing the foot-bridge in their neat blue and white uniforms like those of well-trained house-servants. These are the crab pickers.
I testify with gratitude that they have good beer on draught in St. Michael's. Formerly this was a great ship-building place; many of the Baltimore clippers were launched here, besides half a dozen barges for Commodore Barney's flotilla in 1814. Perhaps it was on that account that the British fleet undertook to bombard the village. The inhabitants fooled them by putting out all lights near the ground and hanging lanterns aloft. Thus the cannon-balls overshot their mark. The oldest house in town is called Cannon Ball House, because a British ball dropped through the roof and bounced down the stairs past the owner's wife without doing any great harm. Nowadays for fifty-one weeks in the year St. Michael's appears to be asleep with one eye open. During the fifty-second week the Miles River Regatta takes place. The arrival of half the boats on Chesapeake Bay and hundreds of cars rouses the village to a fever of activity.
Before coming to Claiborne at the end of this road — which used to be the terminus of a little railway and still has a ferry — by turning off to the left you will be led to Tilghman's Island, a part of Talbot County as different as could be imagined from the sophisticated purlieus of Easton. Here you are back in Maryland. Vincent Van Gogh would have found a subject exactly to his taste in the view from the drawbridge leading to the island; dazzling sunlight, a flood of green seawater lazily swirling under the bridge and naked, sun-tanned bodies sporting in the water; wide stretches of sea and sky on either hand. In the village of Tilghman the inhabitants salute you, the little boys smile, the old Negroes murmur "Gentlemen!" as they pass. Here is another crab house with a terrific babel of conversation coming through the apertures and more Negro girls in neat uniforms passing in and out.
Down at the end of the island is a smaller village, Fairbank, which smacks even more of the Golden Age. Here everybody's face lights up quite frankly at the sight of strangers; they are eager to enter into conversation. What a silly diffidence it is which restrains us from talking to whomever we may meet! When I am alone I can sometimes conquer it, but on this occasion we were two. Tongues of water crept all around the little village. There was Blackwalnut Cove and - Dogwood Harbor. Should Fairbank ever be "developed," such names will undoubtedly be supplanted by names like Bellhaven, and Windermere.
At the end of a side road near Claiborne is Rich Neck, one of the original manors in Talbot. The manor-house, dating from Revolutionary times, is much changed in appearance, but close by stands the strangest piece of architecture in the County. It is a brick building of the middle seventeenth century, twelve by twenty-two feet with walls twenty-one inches thick. The ceiling is a tunnel vault; there are tiny windows with "ogee" heads, and, when the thick vine is lifted from the front end, a curious quatrefoil is disclosed, carved out of the brick. The little building is supposed to have been a chapel.
Starting out to the southeast of Easton one crosses several branches of the Tred Avon, one branch bearing the name of Peachblossom Creek, which lingers pleasantly in the memory. At the end of a tree-bordered private road to the right is Avondale, or Turner's Point. Little remains of the original house but a story clings around the spot that is characteristic of old Talbot. After Turner, the original grantee, died, a Thomas Skillington established a ship-yard on his property which was so remote from the attention of the authorities that it is said the "Brethren of the Coast," that is, buccaneers, refitted here in safety. One of his customers was a Captain Martin who, on his return from a voyage, would bring sufficient coin to cover over the large dining-room table with Spanish dollars a foot deep. Those were the days!
Skillington's will, probated in 1699, bequeathed the shipyard to his son. Piracy and buccaneering continued to flourish during and after Queen Anne's War (1701 to 1713) and the second Skillington continued to serve the "Brethren" until about 1730, by which time Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard Thatch, Captain Kidd and some other leaders had had their necks stretched and the coast was said to be fairly clear. Even so late as 1750 we note many pieces-of-eight, chequins, and pistoles in the subscriptions for the Talbot County Free School, showing that the "Brethren's" money was still circulating. A later owner of Turner's Point was an ex-sea-captain, Jeremiah Banning, whose Log, discovered and published in 1933, presents an interesting picture of sea life in his day.
This whole neck is full of stories. Otwell is here, and picturesque little Jenna (properly Jena), with its very steep roof and tall, narrow dormers. It was so named during the War of 1812 by its then owner, Jacob Gibson, who was a great admirer of Napoleon, and called other properties of his Friedland, Austerlitz, and Marengo. A political enemy, after downing Gibson, called his own place in derision Waterloo. Gibson owned Sharp's Island near the mouth of the Choptank. When a landing party from the British squadron raided it and carried off some of his cattle, Gibson had the temerity to board the Admiral's flagship where he put up such a big talk that he actually got paid for his cattle. He was then accused by his neighbors of having sold out to the British. To pay them off, Gibson sailed into St. Michael's harbor with a red bandanna at the masthead and beating on an empty rum-puncheon in lieu of a drum. The inhabitants, thinking the British had come, sent their women and children out of danger and hastily assembled the militia. When the trick was discovered, Gibson's career almost ended there and then, but he talked himself out of that, too.
Just before coming to Oxford, one passes on the left the gates of Bonfield, the home of Hervey Allen, the author of Anthony Adverse, built on the site of an ancient Chamberlaine house. The new house, which faithfully conforms to the Maryland tradition, has great charm. It stands on a slight rise which is said to have been made by slaves who brought the earth in baskets on their backs from the near-by Boone Creek.
Oxford is a village of insinuating charm. It occupies a peninsula with the water stealing around on every side. Out in front lies the immense mouth of the Tred Avon River which joins the still vaster estuary of the Choptank just beyond. From the southerly end of the village you look straight out into Chesapeake Bay where sky and water meet. Back of the village is a landlocked harbor to protect the fishing and oyster fleet.
In the middle of the eighteenth century Oxford rivaled Annapolis in the volume of its trade. Large London and Liverpool firms established branches here for trading with the colonists. Record-books of the port collectors show that at one time nearly two hundred vessels were registered at the customs house. Other ports took this trade and in 1790 a chronicler was writing: "The once well-worn streets are now grown in grass, save a few narrow tracks made by sheep and swine; and the strands have more the appearance of an uninhabited island than where human feet have ever trod." Another kind of prosperity is now slowly returning to the old village; its facilities for water-sports are attracting summer visitors in increasing numbers.
The present Oxford shows few evidences of antiquity except in its grand old trees. The wide main street is lined with comfortable dwellings neither new nor old, and the curving street, which follows the shore of the harbor, has smaller houses facing the water, one of which is quaintly designed in the likeness of a steamboat's superstructure. The main street is Morris Street, in tribute to Robert Morris, who came here in 1738 and whose son was the great Robert who, as Agent of Finance, steered the Continental ship past the rocks of bankruptcy with wonderful skill — and afterwards became a bankrupt. In a yard on Morris Street is a grapevine planted in 1775 which still bears abundantly. The water-side street is still called the Strand.
The last time I visited Oxford a sudden shower descended and my friend and I sought shelter on the porch of an old hotel at the foot of Morris Street. I believe that this building incorporates a part of the original Morris house. The porch roof leaked so plentifully we were driven inside the building, and we called for beer. On the wall was painted in large letters with a pointing hand: "To the Used Beer Department." "What is the used beer department?" I asked of the little village girl who brought the beer, and then I saw the point and blushed. She was not in the least discomposed, "The Gents' toilet." Oxford humor.
On the road south from Easton is the village of Trappe which has the distinction in this watery country of being purely agricultural. There is not a boat in sight. At the end of the road a concrete bridge more than a mile and a half long crosses the Choptank to Dorchester County and the city of Cambridge. Every region has its local jealousies. In Talbot they affect to believe that all the country beyond Choptank, Trans-Choptankia they term it, is inhabited by a distinctly inferior race.
Contributed 2024 Dec 3 by Norma Hass, extracted from 1942 Maryland Main and the Eastern Shore by Hulbert Footner, pages 169-184.
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