In full justice to the Chesapeake Club the scribe must admit that such light-weights as Billy Talbot, Torn Gunning, and Carter Thorn did not fairly represent the standing of the organization. Many of the most cultivated and enlightened men about Kennedy Square and the neighboring country enjoyed its privileges; among them not only such men as Richard Horn, Nathan Gill, the Chief-Justice of the State, and those members of the State Legislature whose birth was above reproach, but most of the sporting gentry of the county, as well as many of the more wealthy planters who lived on the Bay and whose houses were opened to their fellow-members when the ducks were flying. Each man's lineage, occupation, and opinions on the leading topics of the time were as well known to the club as to the man himself. Any new-corner presenting himself for membership was always subjected to the severest scrutiny, and had to be favorably passed upon by a large majority of the committee before a sufficient number of votes could be secured for his election. The only outsider elected for years had been Amos Cobb, of Vermont, the abolitionist, as he was generally called, who invariably wore black broad-cloth and whose clean-shaven face--a marked contrast to the others--with its restless black eyes, strong nose, and firm mouth, was as sharp and hard as the rocks of his native State. His election to full membership of the Chesapeake Club was not due to his wealth and commercial standing--neither of these would have availed him--but to the fact that he had married a daughter of Judge Wharton of Wharton Hall, and had thus, by reason of his alliance with one of the first families of the State, been admitted to all the social privileges of Kennedy Square. This exception in his favor, however, had never crippled Cobb's independence nor stifled his fearlessness in expressing his views on any one of the leading topics of the day. The Vermonter had worked with his hands when a boy on his father's farm, and believed in the dignity of labor and the blessings of self-support. He believed, too, in the freedom of all men, black and white, and looked upon slavery as a crime. He expressed these sentiments openly and unreservedly, and declared that no matter how long he might live South he would never cease to raise his voice against a system which allowed a man--as he put it--"to sit down in the shade and fan himself to sleep while a lot of niggers whose bodies he owned were sweating in a corn-field to help feed and clothe him." These sentiments, it must be said, did not add to his popularity, although the time had not yet arrived when he would have been thrown into the street for uttering them.