They hewed the pines on Haunted PointTo build the pungy boat,And other axes than their ownYet other echoes smote;They heard the phantom carpenters,But not a man could see;And every pine that crashed to earthBrought down a viewless tree.They launched the pungy, not alone;Another vessel slippedDown in the water with their own,And ghostly sailors shipped;They heard the rigging flap and creak,And hollow orders cried.But not a living man could seek,And not a boat beside.They sailed away from Haunted Point,Convoyed by something more:A boatswain's whistle answered back,And oar replied to oar.No matter where the anchor dropped,The fiends would not aroint,And every morn the pungy boatStill lay off Haunted Point.They hailed; and voices as in fogSeemed half to speak again—A devilish chuckling rolled afar,And mutiny of men.The parson of the islands saidIt was the pirate band,Whose gold was lost on Haunted PointAnd hid with bloody hand.Until what time a kidnapped boy,By ruffians whipped and stole,Should in the groves of Haunted PointConvert his stealer's soul!They stole the island parson's child,He said a little prayer:Down sank the ground; a gliding soundWent whispering through the air.And in the depths the pungy sank;And, as the divers told,They sought the wreck to lift again,And found the pirates' gold.And in a chapel close at handThe pious freedmen toil;No slaves are left in all the land,Nor any pirates' spoil.
They hewed the pines on Haunted PointTo build the pungy boat,And other axes than their ownYet other echoes smote;They heard the phantom carpenters,But not a man could see;And every pine that crashed to earthBrought down a viewless tree.
They launched the pungy, not alone;Another vessel slippedDown in the water with their own,And ghostly sailors shipped;They heard the rigging flap and creak,And hollow orders cried.But not a living man could seek,And not a boat beside.
They sailed away from Haunted Point,Convoyed by something more:A boatswain's whistle answered back,And oar replied to oar.No matter where the anchor dropped,The fiends would not aroint,And every morn the pungy boatStill lay off Haunted Point.
They hailed; and voices as in fogSeemed half to speak again—A devilish chuckling rolled afar,And mutiny of men.The parson of the islands saidIt was the pirate band,Whose gold was lost on Haunted PointAnd hid with bloody hand.
Until what time a kidnapped boy,By ruffians whipped and stole,Should in the groves of Haunted PointConvert his stealer's soul!They stole the island parson's child,He said a little prayer:Down sank the ground; a gliding soundWent whispering through the air.
And in the depths the pungy sank;And, as the divers told,They sought the wreck to lift again,And found the pirates' gold.And in a chapel close at handThe pious freedmen toil;No slaves are left in all the land,Nor any pirates' spoil.
People say that a certain tombstone in the London Tract "Hardshell" Baptist graveyard, near Newark, Delaware, will give to the ear placed flat upon it the sound of a ticking like a watch. The London Tract Church, as its name implies, was the worshipping place of certain settlers who either came from London, or chose land owned by a London company. It is a quaint edifice of hard stone, with low-bent bevelled roof, and surrounded by a stone wall, which has a shingle coping. The wall incloses many gravestones, their inscriptions showing that very many of the old worshippers of the church were Welsh. Some large and healthy forest trees partly shade the graveyard and the grassy and sandy cross-roads where it stands, near the brink of the pretty White Clay Creek.
I climbed over the coping of the graveyard wall last spring, and followed my companion, the narrator of the following story, to what appeared to be the very oldest portion of the inclosure. The tombstones were in some cases quite illegible as to inscriptions, worn bare and smooth by more than a century's rains and chipping frosts, and others were sunken deep in the grass so as to afford only partial recompense for the epitaph hunter.
"This is the Ticking Stone," said my companion, pointing to a recumbent slab, worn smooth and scarcely showing a trace of former lettering; "put your ear upon it while I pull away the weeds, and then note if you hear any thing."
I laid my ear upon the mossy stone, and almost immediately felt an audible, almost tangible ticking, like that of a lady's watch.
"You are scratching the stone, Pusey," I cried to my informant.
"No! Upon my honor! That is not the sound of a scratch that you hear. It cannot be any insect nor any process of moving life in the stone or beneath it. Can you liken it to any thing but the equal motion of a rather feeble timepiece?"
I listened again, and this time longer, and a sort of superstition grew over me, so that had I been alone, probably I would have experienced a sense of timid loneliness. To stand amidst those silent memorial stones of the early times and hear a watch beat beneath one of them as perfectly as you can feel it in your vest pocket, and then to feel your heart start nervously at the recognition of this disassociated sound, is not satisfying, even when in human company.
"This is the best ghost I have ever found," I said. "Perhaps some one has slipped a watch underneath, for it is somebody's watch; thereissomething real in it."
"I took the stone up once myself," said Pusey, "and the ticking then seemed to come up from the ground. While I deliberated, an old man came out of yonder old sexton-looking house, and warned me not to disturb the dead. He crossed the wall, and assisted me to replace the stone, and then bade me sit down upon it, ancient mariner-like, while he disclosed the cause of the phenomenon."
Here my companion stopped a minute—and in the pause we could hear the old trees wave very solemnly above us, and a nut, or burr, or sycamore ball, came rattling down the old kirk roof as we stood there in the graves, to startle us the more, and then he said:
"It is just as queer as the tale he told me—the disappearance of that old man. Nobody about here can recognize him from my descriptions. He walked toward the old mill down the Newark road, and the nexttime I looked up he was gone. The people in the house there think I am flighty in my mind for insisting upon his appearance to me at all."
"Go on with the tale right here, my flesh-creeping friend," I said. "It will do us good to feel occasionally solemn."
"This stone, young man," said my Quakerly rebuker, in a hard country farmer's voice; "this stone is the London Tract Ticking Stone. It is the oldest preacher and admonitor in this churchyard. It is older than the graves of any of the known pastors or communicants round about it.
"In the year 1764 the comparative solitude of this region was broken by a large party of chain-bearers, rod-men, axe-men, commissaries, cooks, baggage-carriers, and camp-followers. They had come by order of Lord Baltimore and William Penn, to terminate a long controversy between two great landed proprietors, and they were led by Charles Mason, of the Royal Observatory, at Greenwich, England, and by Jeremiah Dixon, the son of a collier discovered in a coalpit. For three years they continued westward, running their stakes over mountains and streams, like a gypsy camp in appearance, frightening the Indians with their sorcery. But, near this spot, they halted longest, to fix with precision the tangent point, and the point of intersection of three States—the circular head of Delaware, the abutting right angle of Maryland, and the tiny pan-handle of Pennsylvania.
"The people of this region were sparse in number, but of strong, sober, and yet wild characteristics. The long boundary quarrel had made them predatory, and though God-fearing people, they would fight with all their religious intensity for their right in the land and the dominion of their particular province. They suspended their feuds when the surveying battalion came into their broken country, and looked with curious interest upon all that pertained to the distinguished foreign mathematicians. Around their camp of tents and pack-mules, peddlers and preachers called together their motley congregations, and the sound of axes clearing the timber was accompanied by fiddling and haranguing, the fighting of dogs, and the coarse tones of religious or business oratory. It was in the height of the era of the great period of the Dissenters in England, and Methodist, Baptist, and Calvinistic zealots were piercing to the boundaries of English-speaking people, wild forerunners of those organized bands of clergy which were speedily to make our colonies sober-minded, and prepare them for self-government.
"Charles Mason was the scientific spirit of the party—a cool, observing, painstaking, plodding man, slow in his processes and reliable in his conclusions, and the bond of friendship between himself and Dixon was that of two unequal minds admiring the superiorities of each other. They had already proceeded together to the Cape of Good Hope on two occasions to study an eclipse and an occultation. Mason liked Dixon for his ready spirits, almost improvident courage, speed with details, and worldly bearing. Though little is known of their memories now, because they left us no prolific records and spent much of the period of service among us in the midst of the wilderness or in the reticence required for mathematical calculation, yet they were the successors of Washington in the surveying of the Alleghany ridges. Their survey was reliable; the line was true. How much superior does it stand to-day to the line of thirty degrees thirty minutes, which is the next great political parallel below it, and was partly run only a few years afterwards! Up to their line for the next hundred years flowed the waters of slavery, but sent no human drop beyond, which did not evaporate in the free light of a milder sun. God speed the surveyor, whoever he be, who plants the stakes of a tranquil commonwealth and leaves them tobe the limit of bad principles, the pioneer line of good ones!
"Charles Mason had spent many years of his life, up to his old age, experimenting with timepieces of his own invention. Many years before, Sir Isaac Newton had called the attention of the British Government to the necessity for an accurate portable time-keeper at sea, to determine longitude, and in 1714 Parliament offered a reward of 20,000 pounds sterling for such a chronometer. Thenceforward for fifty years the inventive spirits of England and the Continent were secretly at work to produce a timepiece which would deserve the large reward, amongst them Charles Mason, who labored with such perfect discretion and uncommunicative self-reliance that none knew, none will ever know, the motive principle he employed or the enginery he devised. While he was working at this survey, near the spot at which we stand, the Board of Award gave the £20,000 to one John Harrison, almost at the very instant when Mason and Dixon's line was begun. This you can confirm by any history of Horology. Charles Mason lived down to the year 1787, surviving Dixon, who had died in England ten years previously, and he was known to say to the end of his days, to people resident in Philadelphia, that a child had eaten up £20,000 belonging to him at a single mouthful.
"The child whom the neighborhood at that time accused of this act was known in later life as Fithian Minuit, babe of a woman of mixed English and Finnish-Dutch descent, who came from the fishermen's town of Head of Elk, a few hours jog to the southward, to sell fish to the surveying camp. She was a woman of mingled severity of features and bodily obesity, uniting in one temper and frame the Scandinavian and the Low Dutch traits, ignorant good-humor, grim commerce, and stolid appetite. Her baby was the fattest, quaintest, and ugliest in the country; ready to devour any thing, to grin at any thing, go to the armsof everybody, and, in short, it represented all the traits of the Middle State races—the government of the members, including the brain, by the belly.
"One day this Finnish-Dutch baby—aged perhaps two years—was picked up by one of the assistant surveyors and carried into the tent of Charles Mason. The great surveyor was at that instant bending down over a small metallic object which he was examining through the medium of a lens. He recognized the child, and seemed glad of the opportunity to dismiss more serious occupation from his mind, so he instantly leaped up and poked the fat urchin with his thumb, tempting the bite of its teeth with his forefinger, and was otherwise reducing his tired faculties to the needs of a child's amusement, when suddenly the voice of its mother at the tent's opening drew him away.
"'Fresh fish, mighty surveyor! Fall shad, and the most beautiful yellow perch. Buy something for the sake of Minuit's baby!'
"The celebrated surveyor, who seemed in an admirable humor, stepped just outside the tent to look at the fish, and in that little interval his assistant, seized with inquisitiveness, stole up to his table, and picked up the tiny object lying there under the magnifying glass.
"'This is the little ticking seducer which absorbs my master's time,' he said. 'Why, it isn't big enough for an infant to count the minutes of its life upon it!'
"At this the fat, good-humored baby, anticipating something to eat, reached out its hands. The surveyor's assistant, in a moment of mischief, put the object in the child's grasp. The child clutched it, bit at it, and swallowed it whole in an instant.
"Before the assistant surveyor could think of any other harm done than the possible choking of the child, the child's mother and the great surveyor entered the tent. The arms of the first reached for her offspring, and of the second for the subject of his experiment.
"'My chronometer!'
"'The child of the fish-woman ate it!'
"The fish-woman screamed, and reversed the urchin after the manner of mothers, and swung him to and fro like a pendulum. He came up a trifle red in the face, but laughing as usual, and the ludicrous inappositeness of the great loss, the unconscious cause of it, the baby's wonderful digestion, the assistant's distress, and the surveyor's calm but pallid self-control, made Jeremiah Dixon, dropping in at the minute, roar with laughter.
"'Dixon,' said Mason, 'the work of half my life, my everlasting timepiece, just completed and set going, has found a temperature where it requires no compensation balance.'
"'I am glad of it,' said his associate, 'for now we can proceed with Mason and Dixon's line, and nothing else!'
"A look, more of pity than of reproach, passed over Mason's scarcely ruffled face—the pity of one man solely conscious of a great object lost, for another, indifferent or ignorant both of the object and the loss. He took the smiling urchin in his hands, and raising it upon his shoulder, placed his ear to its side. Thence came with faint regularity the sound of a simple, gentle ticking. They all heard it by turns, and, while they paused in puzzled wonder and humor, the undaunted infant looked down as innocent as a chubby, cheery face painted on some household clock. The innocent expression of the child touched the mathematician's heart. He filled a glass with good Madeira wine, and drank the devourer's health in these benignant words:
"'May Minuit's baby run as long and as true as the article on which he has made his meal!'
"Next day they set the great stone in the corner of the State of Maryland, and, breaking camp, vanished westward through the cleft of light opened by their pioneers, pursued yet for many miles by a motley multitude.
"Before many years this fertile country filled up withhamlets, mills, and churches; the War of Independence scarcely interrupted its prosperity, because the Quaker element adhered with constancy to neither side, and only one campaign was fought here. The story of the boy who ate a watch passed out of general knowledge and remark; he was known to have been a drummer at the battle of Chadd's Ford, and to have buried his mother before the close of the war, at the Delaware fishing hamlet of Marcus Hook, amongst her Finnish progenitors.
"But soon after the peace, the short, fat body and queer, merry Dutch face of Fithian Minuit were known all along the roads of Chester, Cecil, and Newcastle counties, by parts of the people of three States, as components of one of the least offensive, most industrious, and most lively and popular young chaps around the head of the Chesapeake.
"He was respectful with the old and congenial with the young—always going and never tired, up early and late, of a chirruping sort of address and an equal temper, and while he appeared to be thrifty and money-making, he did all manner of good turns for the high and the humble; and, although everybody said he was the homeliest young man in the region, yet more village girls went to their front doors to see him than if he had been a showman coming to town to do feats of magic. He was not unintelligent either, and could play on the violin, compute accounts equal to the best country book-keeper, and as he was of religious turn, although attached to no particular denomination, the meeting-houses on every side, hardly excepting the Quakers themselves, delighted to see him drive up on Sundays and tell an anecdote to the children and sing a little air, half-hymn sort, half stave, but always given with a good countenance, which apologized for the worldly notes of it. If any severe interpreter of Christian amusements took the people to task for tolerating such a universal and desultory character, there were others to rise up and ask what evil or passionateword or act of sorry behavior in Fithian Minuit could be instanced. The severe Francis Asbury himself raised the question once on the Bohemia Manor amongst the Methodists, and got so little support that he charged young Minuit with the possession of some devilish art or spell to entrap the people; but Fithian once, when the good itinerant's horse broke down on the road, met Mr. Asbury, won his affections, and mended his big silver watch.
"This mending of clocks, watches, and every description of time-keepers was the occupation of Minuit. He had picked up the art, some said, from a Yankee in the army at the close of the war, and certainly no man of his time or territory had such good luck with timepieces. Residing in the little village of Christina (by the pretentious called Christi-anna, and by the crude, with nearer rectitude, called Cristene), Fithian kept a snug little shop full of all manners and forms of clocks, dials, sand-glasses, hour-burning candles, water-clocks, and night tapers. He had amended and improved the new Graham clock, called the 'dead scapement,' or 'dead-beat escapement' (the origin of our modern worddead-beat, signifying a man who does not meet his engagements, whereas the original 'dead-beat' was the most faithful engagements-keeper of its time. Perhaps a dead-beat nowadays is a time-server; for this would be a correct derivation). From this shop the young Minuit, in a plain but reliable wagon, with a nag never fast and never slow, and indifferent to temperatures, travelled the country for a radius of forty miles—not embarrassed even by the Delaware, which he crossed once a month, and attended fully to the temporal and partly to the spiritual needs of all the Jerseymen betwixt Elsinborough and Swedesboro.
"Over the door of Minuit's whitewashed cabin on the knoll of Christina was the sign of a jovial, fat person, bearing some resemblance to himself, in the centre of whose stomach stood a clock inscribed, 'My timeis everybody's.' Past this little shop went the entire long caravan and cavalcade by land between the North and South, stage-coaches, mail-riders, highwaymen, chariots, herdsters, and tramps; for Christina bridge was on the great tide-water road and at the head of navigation on the Swedish river of the same name, so that here vessels from the Delaware transferred their cargo to wagons, and a portage of only ten miles to the Head of Elk gave goods and passengers reshipment down the Chesapeake. This village declined only when the canal just below it was opened in 1829 and a little railway in 1833. It was nearly a century and a half old when Minuit set his sign there, before General Washington went past it to be inaugurated. From Fithian's window the pleasant land was seen spread out below him beyond the Christina; and the Swedish, Dutch, and English farms smiled from their loamy levels on sails which moved with scarcely perceptible motion through the narrow dykes planted with greenest willows. Before his door the teamsters, ill-tempered with lashing and swearing at their teams in the ruts of Iron Hill, schoolboys from Nottingham, millers' men from Upper White Clay, and bargemen and stage passengers, recovered temper to see the sign of the great paunch with a timepiece set so naturally in it indicating the hour of dinner. Within they found the clock-maker, with face beaming as if reflected from a watch-case, working handily amongst a hundred ticking pieces, of which he looked to be one. There were large sundials for the outer walls of barns and farm-houses, very popular in the Pennsylvania hills; sand-glasses for the Peninsula, where it cost nothing to fill them; and hour-burning candles, much affected by the Chesapeake gentry, which gave at once light and time. There were ancient striking clocks, such as the monks may have used to disturb them for early prayers, which, with a horrible rattle of wheels and clash of heavy weights, hammered the alarm. There were the tremendous watches of river captains who had aspiredto go to sea, and old crutch escapement watches which Huygens himself had perhaps handled in Holland. The window was filled with trains of wheels and pinions, snails and racks, crystals, and faces and watches, cackling at each other. There were striking clocks which rung chimes or rocked like little vessels on apparent billows, or started off with notes like grasshoppers. A hundred of the most musical tree-frogs shut up in a piano might give a feeble notion of the tunes and thrummings assembled in this shop. It was the same day or night, and the power of Fithian Minuit over time-keepers was nearly miraculous. He appeared to be able to smile an old watch into action. Transferred to his hand, some spent and rusty sentinel, long silent and useless, seemed to feel the warmth of the mender and resumed the round of duty. He would buy from the old estate halls on the Sassafras and the Chester rivers, tall, solemn clocks, dead to the purpose of their creation, their stately learned faces lost to former automatic expressions or waggery, and when exposed to the infectious influences of his shop, a gurgle of sound as of the inhalation of air into their lungs had been heard, according to some people, and next day the carcass of the clock would be found resonant and its faculties recovered. One day the great patriots, John Dickinson and Cæsar Rodney, riding past Christina together, stopped for dinner, and sent their watches in to be cleaned meantime.
"'Minuit,' said Rodney, 'you are a devil with a time-keeper!'
"'Nay, Minuit,' said Dickinson, 'thou art the gentlest custodian of time in our parts. I would some one could regulate these States and times like thee.'
"The country round resorted to Minuit for repairs, but he generally came himself along the roads fortuitously about the time anybody's dials stood still. He was almost equal as a weather prophet to his fame as a mechanic, and as his broad, fat face, blue eyes, andportly body passed some farmer's gate, the cheery cry would go up, perhaps:
"'Make hay—the wind's right!' or again: 'Time enough, farmer, with another pair of hands. But it's coming from the east!'
"Had it been possible to suggest any superstition about a man universally popular, people would have said that this henchman of time and minute-hand of diligence drew his power from doubtful sources. Further north, where there was less superstition than amongst these mingled unspiritualized populations, Minuit might have been burnt as a wizard. A little doctor in the Deutsch hills, who once prescribed for the clock-mender, reported that his pulse had a metallic beat, and, looking suddenly up, he saw, where Minuit's face had been, a round clock face looking down and ticking at him. This doctor was a worthless fellow, however, and loose of tongue. Minuit, it was observed, never used a tuning-fork in church, like all leaders of religious music, but cast his eyes down a moment towards his heart, and tapped his foot, and then, as if catching the pitch somewhere from within, he raised the tune and carried it forward with an exquisite sense of rhythm.
"A very old man and a cripple, who lived across the way from Minuit's, affected to observe extraordinary changes in his stature according to the weather changes, elongating as the temperature rose, and in very cold weather sinking into himself; this man also observed, on the day of a solar eclipse, that for the period there was nothing at all in the place where the clock-mender's head had been except a ring of light which enlarged as the disk of the sun was released. But who could rely upon the vagaries of an old man, who could do nothing but make memoranda out of his window upon the doings of his neighbors?
"If anybody knew more than that Fithian Minuit was an obliging, neighborly man, and a model for mechanics, it must have been the subject of his romance.He was related to have told all that he knew upon the mystery of his being to his clergyman, and there is nothing now to confirm the gossip; for the preacher himself has gone to sleep in the old Shrewsbury graveyard in Maryland.
"At Port Penn, where the last island in the channel of the lower Delaware now raises its flaming beacon, and the belated collier steers safely by Reedy Island light, lived the daughter of an old West India and coasting captain, who would permit his chronometers to be repaired and cleaned by nobody but Minuit. His cottage stood where now there is a broad and sandy street leading to a wooden pier and to bathing-houses on a pleasure beach. The few people near at hand were pilots, captains of bay craft, and grain-buyers; although the Dutch and Swedish farms, alternating with long marshes, musical with birds, had lined the wide Delaware at this point many a year. In calm, sunny weather, the broad beauty of the river and its low gold and emerald shores, with bulky vessels swinging up on the slow full tide, combined the sceneries of America and the Netherlands; but when a gale blew over the low shores, scattering the reed-birds like the golden pollen of the marsh lilies, and cold white gulls succeeded, diving and careening like sharks of the sky, the ships and coasters felt no serenity in these wide yeasty reaches of the Delaware bay, and they labored to drop anchor behind the natural breakwater of Reedy Island. There, clustering about as thickly in that olden time as they now seek from all the ocean round the costly shelter of Henlopen breakwater, coaster and pirate, fisherman and slaver, sent up the prayer a beneficent government has since granted in the fullest measure, for a perfect Coast Survey and a vigilant Lighthouse Board.
"The daughter of Captain Lum was named Lois, and she was the junior of Fithian Minuit by several years, a slender, beautiful girl, with hair and eyes ofthe softest brown, and household ways, daughterly and endearing.
"The old sea-captain, who made five voyages a year to the nearer Indies, and sent ashore to Port Penn as he passed, returning, the best of rum and the freshest of tropical fruits, looked with a jealous eye upon any possible suitor to his daughter, and had, perhaps, embarrassed her prospects for a younger protector, if such she had ever wished. But he loved to see the clock-maker come to the cottage, who had never shown partiality for any woman, while popular with all.
"'Minuit,' he used to say, 'the best man on watch by land or sea, thou North Star; look to my girl as to my chronometer, and I'll pay thee twice the cost of thy time!'
"It was the captain's delight, while ashore, to have every timepiece, stationary or portable, taken apart in the presence of his daughter and himself, while he told his sailor yarns, and Lois stood ready to serve his punch, or pass to the fat, smooth-faced, cheerful Minuit the pieces of mechanism: brass gimbals, chronometer-boxes, wheels and springs, ship-glasses, compasses, the manifold parts of little things by which men grope their way out of sight of land, hung between a human watch and the crystal shell of the embossed heaven. Chronometers were with Minuit attractive and yet awe-giving subjects. The legend of his childhood, well forgotten by all else, said that he had swallowed a chronometer, so small that a sea-captain could swim with it in his mouth. And now the sailors of all the navies cruised by the aid of clumsy watches, big as house-clocks, which to look at made Minuit smile with pity.
"'Captain Lum,' he said aloud, on the eve of a voyage in the winter season, 'I have often yearned to go to sea. The sight of it makes me a little wild. I think I could guess my way over it and about it, by inherent reckoning.'
"He saw the pair of white hands holding something before him tremble a little, and he looked up. Thespiritual face of Lois was looking at his with wistful apprehension and interest. If ever his pulse beat out of time it was now—for in that exchange of glances he felt what she did not understand—that he was beloved.
"Pain and joy, not swiftly, but softly, filled Minuit—pain, because he had loved this girl and wished never to have her know it, but would keep it an unbreathed, a holy mystery; and joy, like any lover's recognizing himself in the dear heart he had never importuned.
"Next day the good ship Chirpland came off Port Penn. The jolly captain saying adieu to Minuit, clasped his hand.
"'I saw thy look and my daughter's yesterday,' he said. 'It is weak of me to deny her a man like thee, thou sailor's friend. My ship is old. These coasts are dangerous. Nights and days come when we get no sight of lights ashore or in heaven. If thy chronometer fail, fail not thou, but be to her repairer and possessor!'
"The discovery and the trust embarrassed Minuit, but he had never denied the request of any man. His time, as his sign affirmed, was everybody's. Yet a thrill, a twang, a twinge of delicious fear passed through him now. He loved this girl dearly, but he feared to love at all. He had now both the parental and the womanly recognition, and his days were lonely even with his garrulous timepieces, but he felt a lonelier sense of the possibility of turning her affection to awe. Those queer legends of his birth, his affinity for fixed luminaries and motions, and his conscious knowledge that he stood in some way related to spheres and orbits, and the laws of revolution and period, had never disturbed his mind in its calculations. But if he did stand exceptional in these respects to his fellow-men, might another and a beloved one comprehend what he himself did not? Yet the kindly regard of his neighbors, the composure of a conscience well consulted, and the hope that he was worthy of human love, made him resolve to keep the captain's admonition, though he hoped the occasion to obey it might never arrive.
"In the absence of the good ship, however, love could not be deceived. It spoke in waitings and longings, and in tender glances and considerateness. She knew the rattle of his carriage-wheels, and he could feel her in the air like the breath of a beautiful day soon to appear in distance. Time, toward which he stood in such natural harmony, was dearer that it contained this passion and life more exquisite, and himself more questionable for it all.
"It was a stormy winter. Ships strewed the coast between Hatteras and Navesink, and the capes of the Delaware received many a tattered barque. The ice poured down and wedged itself between Reedy Island and the shores, and crushed to pieces many that had escaped the ocean gales. One night in a raging storm the door of Captain Lum's cabin was thrown open, and a sailor appeared fresh from the water. He bore in his hand a chronometer, which Minuit recognized in a moment, and he drew his arm for the first time around the maiden's form.
"'The Chirpland went down on Five Fathom Shoal, and the captain stood by her. He bade us return his chronometer, and say that he perished in the assurance that his daughter was left to the guidance of another fully as sure.'
"'My child,' said Minuit, 'I accept thee wholly, sharing thy griefs! Weep, but on the breast of one who loves thee!'
"The village of Christina rejoiced when its broad-faced, dimpled friend came home with a bride so fair and well-descended. They dressed the sign before his door with flowers. Only the groom wore an anxious face as he led her into his tidy home, now for the first time blessed with a mistress.
"The night of the nuptials came softly down, as nowhere else except upon the skies of the Delaware and Chesapeake, and Minuit was happy. The thrummingclocks in the shop below mingled their tones and tickings in one consonant chorus, scarcely heard above the long drone and low monotonies of the insects in the creeks and woods, which assisted silence. The husband slept, how well beloved he could not know.
"In the dreams of the night he was awakened. In the pale moonshine he saw his wife, clad in her garments of whiteness, standing by his bed all trembling.
"'Tell me,' she said, 'what it is that I hear? I have listened till I am afraid. As I lay in this room perfectly silent, with my head, my husband, nearest your heart, I felt the ticking of a watch. At first it was only curious and strange. Now it haunts me and terrifies me. I am a simple girl, new and nervous to this wedded life. Is this noise natural? What is it?'
"Minuit trembled also.
"'Lois, my bride, my heaven!' he said. 'Oh! pity me, who have tried to pity all and make all happy, if I cannot myself explain away the cause of your alarm. I have kept myself lonely these many years, aware that I was not like other men, but that my heart—no evil monitor to me—gave a different sound. There is nothing in its beat, my wife, to make you fear it. Return and lay your head upon it, and you will hear it say this only, if you listen with faith:love!'
"Thus the watch-maker turned superstition to assurance, and the admonition of his heart was a source of joy instead of fear to the listener at its side. It ticked a few bright years with constancy, and was the last benediction of the world to her ere she was ushered into that peace which passeth understanding.
"At the death of his wife Minuit felt a deeper sense of his responsibility to time, and the finite uses of it expanded to a cheerful conception of the infinite. The country round was generally settled by a religious people, and the many meeting-houses of different sects had his equal confidence and sympathy. Pursuing his craft with unwearied diligence, and delighting the homestead with his violin as of old, a more pensiveand wistful expression replaced his smile, and love withdrawn beckoned him toward it beyond the boundaries of period. Hard populations, which would not listen to preachers, heard with delight the amiable warnings of this friendly man, and as his own generation grew older, a new race dawned to whom he appeared in the light of a pure-spirited evangelist. 'Improve the time! watch it! ennoble it! It is a part of the beautiful and perpetual circle of everlasting duty. It is to the great future only the little disk of a second-hand, traversed as swiftly, while the great rim of heaven accepts it as a part of the eternal round!' Such was the burden of his sermon.
"He could ride all along the roads, and hear his missionaries preaching for him wherever a clock struck, or a dial on the gable of a great stone barn propelled its shadows. His tracts were in every farmer's vest pocket. Whatever he made he consecrated with a paragraph of counsel.
"The old sign faded out. The clock-maker's sight grew dim, but his apprehensions of the everlasting love and occupation were clearer and more confident to the end.
"One day they found him in the graveyard of the London Tract, by the side of the spot where his wife was interred, worn and asleep at the ripe age of three-score.
"The mill teams and the farm wagons stopped in the road, and the country folks gathered round in silence.
"'Run down at last,' said one. 'If there are heavenly harps and bells, he hears them now!'"
And there they hear the ticking, the preaching of this faithful life, under the old stone, sending up its pleasant message yet. The stone is perishing like a broken crystal, but the memory of the diligent and useful man beneath it rings amongst the holy harmonies of the country. Though dead, he yet speaketh!
Dull in the night, when the camps were still,Thumped two nags over Good Hope Hill;The white deserter, the passing spy,Took to the brush as the pair went by;The army mule gave over the chase;The Catholic negro, hearing the pace,Said, as they splashed through Oxon Run:"Dey ride like de soldiers who speared God's Son!"But when Good Friday's bells behindDied in the capital on the wind,He who rode foremost paused to say:"Herold, spur up to my side, scared boy!A word has rung in my ears all day—Merely a jingle, 'Nanjemoy.'""Ha!" said Herold, "John, why that'sA little old creek on the river. Surratt'sLies just before us. You halt on the greenWhile I slip in the tavern and get your carbine!"The outlaw drank of the whiskey deep,Which the tipsy landlord, half asleep,Brought to his side, and his broken footHe raised from the stirrup and slashed the boot."Lloyd," he cried, "if some news you invite—Old Seward was stabbed in his bed to-night.LincolnIshot—that long-lived fox—As he looked at the play from the theatre box;And it seemed to me that the sound I heard,As the audience fluttered, like ducks round decoy,Was only the buzz of a musical wordThat I cannot get rid of—'Nanjemoy.'""Twenty miles we must ride before day,Cross Mattawoman, Piscataway,If in the morn we would take to the woodsIn the swamp of Zekiah, at Doctor Mudd's!""Quaint are the names," thought the outlaw then,"Though much I have mingled with Maryland men!I have fever, I think, or my mind's o'erthrown.Though scraped is the flesh by this broken bone,Every jog that I take on this road so lonely,With thoughts, aye bloody, my mind to employ,I can but say, over and over, this only—The drowsy, melodious 'Nanjemoy.'"Silent they galloped by broken gates,By slashes of pines around old estates;By planters' graves afield under clumpsOf blackjack oaks and tobacco stumps;The empty quarters of negroes grinFrom clearings of cedar and chinquopin;From fodder stacks the wild swine flew,The shy young wheat the frost peeped through,And the swamp owl hooted as if she knewOf the crime, as she hailed: "Ahoy! Ahoy!"And the chiming hoofs of the horses drewThe pitiless rhythm of "Nanjemoy."So in the dawn as perturbed and grayThey hid in the farm-house off the way,And the worn assassin dozed in his chair,A voice in his dreams or afloat in the air,Like a spirit born in the Indian corn—Immemorial, vague, forlorn,And disembodied—murmured foreverThe name of the old creek up the river."God of blood!" he said unto Herold,As they groped in the dusk, lost and imperilled,In the oozy, entangled morass and meshOf hanging vines over Allen's Fresh:"The chirp of birds and the drone of frogs,The lizards and crickets from trees and bogsFollow me yet, pursue and ferretMy soul with a word which I used to enjoy,As if it had turned on me like a spiritAnd stabbed my ear with its 'Nanjemoy.'"Ay! Great Nature fury or preacherMakes, as she wists, of the tiniest creature—Arming a word, as it floats on the mind,With the dagger of wrath and the wing of the wind.What, though weighted to take them down,Their swimming steeds in the river they drown,And paddle the farther shore to gain,Chased by gunboats or lost in rain?Many a night they try the ferryAnd the days in haggard sleep employ,But every raft, or float, or wherry,Drifts up the tide to Nanjemoy."Ho! John, we shall have no more annoy,We've crossed the river from Nanjemoy.The bluffs of Virginny their shadows reachTo hide our landing upon the beach!"Repelled from the manse to hide in the barn,The sick wretch hears, like a far-away horn,As he lies on the straw by the snoring boy,The winding echo of "N-a-n-j-e-m-o-y."All day it follows, all night it whines,From the suck of waters, the moan of pines,And the tread of cavalry following after,The flash of flames on beam and rafter,The shot, the strangle, the crash, the swoon,Scarce break his trance or disturb the croonOf the meaningless notes on his lips which fasten,And the soldier hears, as he seeks to convoyThe dying words of the dark assassin,A wandering murmur, like "Nanjemoy."
Dull in the night, when the camps were still,Thumped two nags over Good Hope Hill;The white deserter, the passing spy,Took to the brush as the pair went by;The army mule gave over the chase;The Catholic negro, hearing the pace,Said, as they splashed through Oxon Run:"Dey ride like de soldiers who speared God's Son!"But when Good Friday's bells behindDied in the capital on the wind,He who rode foremost paused to say:"Herold, spur up to my side, scared boy!A word has rung in my ears all day—Merely a jingle, 'Nanjemoy.'"
"Ha!" said Herold, "John, why that'sA little old creek on the river. Surratt'sLies just before us. You halt on the greenWhile I slip in the tavern and get your carbine!"The outlaw drank of the whiskey deep,Which the tipsy landlord, half asleep,Brought to his side, and his broken footHe raised from the stirrup and slashed the boot."Lloyd," he cried, "if some news you invite—Old Seward was stabbed in his bed to-night.LincolnIshot—that long-lived fox—As he looked at the play from the theatre box;And it seemed to me that the sound I heard,As the audience fluttered, like ducks round decoy,Was only the buzz of a musical wordThat I cannot get rid of—'Nanjemoy.'"
"Twenty miles we must ride before day,Cross Mattawoman, Piscataway,If in the morn we would take to the woodsIn the swamp of Zekiah, at Doctor Mudd's!""Quaint are the names," thought the outlaw then,"Though much I have mingled with Maryland men!I have fever, I think, or my mind's o'erthrown.Though scraped is the flesh by this broken bone,Every jog that I take on this road so lonely,With thoughts, aye bloody, my mind to employ,I can but say, over and over, this only—The drowsy, melodious 'Nanjemoy.'"
Silent they galloped by broken gates,By slashes of pines around old estates;By planters' graves afield under clumpsOf blackjack oaks and tobacco stumps;The empty quarters of negroes grinFrom clearings of cedar and chinquopin;From fodder stacks the wild swine flew,The shy young wheat the frost peeped through,And the swamp owl hooted as if she knewOf the crime, as she hailed: "Ahoy! Ahoy!"And the chiming hoofs of the horses drewThe pitiless rhythm of "Nanjemoy."
So in the dawn as perturbed and grayThey hid in the farm-house off the way,And the worn assassin dozed in his chair,A voice in his dreams or afloat in the air,Like a spirit born in the Indian corn—Immemorial, vague, forlorn,And disembodied—murmured foreverThe name of the old creek up the river."God of blood!" he said unto Herold,As they groped in the dusk, lost and imperilled,In the oozy, entangled morass and meshOf hanging vines over Allen's Fresh:"The chirp of birds and the drone of frogs,The lizards and crickets from trees and bogsFollow me yet, pursue and ferretMy soul with a word which I used to enjoy,As if it had turned on me like a spiritAnd stabbed my ear with its 'Nanjemoy.'"
Ay! Great Nature fury or preacherMakes, as she wists, of the tiniest creature—Arming a word, as it floats on the mind,With the dagger of wrath and the wing of the wind.What, though weighted to take them down,Their swimming steeds in the river they drown,And paddle the farther shore to gain,Chased by gunboats or lost in rain?Many a night they try the ferryAnd the days in haggard sleep employ,But every raft, or float, or wherry,Drifts up the tide to Nanjemoy.
"Ho! John, we shall have no more annoy,We've crossed the river from Nanjemoy.The bluffs of Virginny their shadows reachTo hide our landing upon the beach!"Repelled from the manse to hide in the barn,The sick wretch hears, like a far-away horn,As he lies on the straw by the snoring boy,The winding echo of "N-a-n-j-e-m-o-y."All day it follows, all night it whines,From the suck of waters, the moan of pines,And the tread of cavalry following after,The flash of flames on beam and rafter,The shot, the strangle, the crash, the swoon,Scarce break his trance or disturb the croonOf the meaningless notes on his lips which fasten,And the soldier hears, as he seeks to convoyThe dying words of the dark assassin,A wandering murmur, like "Nanjemoy."
The reception at Secretary Flake's was at its height. Bland Van, the President of the nation, had departed with his boys; the punch-bowl had been emptied nine times; and still the cry from our republican society was, "Fill up!"
A pair of young men, unacquainted with each other, pressed at the same time to the punch-bowl, and Jack, the chief ladler, turning from the younger, a clerk in civil dress, helped the elder, a tall naval officer, to a couple of glasses. The clerk, young Utie, who was somewhat flushed, addressed the chief ladler and remarked:
"You dam nigger, didn't you see my glass?"
"See it, sah? Yes! I've seen it seval times afo, dis evening."
Black Jack then received the current allowance of curses for his color and his impudence, all of which he took meekly, till the officer, Lieutenant Dibdo, interrupted on the negro's behalf.
"It's none o' yo affair, I reckon!" cried Utie sullenly.
"The man had no intention of slighting you," said Dibdo. "You have been drinking too much, boy, and your coarseness is coming out."
A fresh crowd of thirsty people pressing up at this point gave Jack his opportunity to cry: "Room around de punch-bowl!"
And the disputants were separated and squeezed by the promenading tides into different rooms.
The officer presently forgot all about it, but not so young Utie, who was partly drunk, entirely vain, not agentleman by nature, and outraged that anybody had dubbed him "a boy." He sought the side of a fine young girl, the daughter of the chief of the bureau where he was employed, and with whom he was in love. She was attired in the free costume of republican receptions—bare arms, a low dress giving ample display to the whitest shoulders in the room, and fine natural hair dressed with flowers. Every gentleman who passed her during the evening had looked his homage freely—old beaux, dignitaries, officers, foreign deputies,roués—and as she had been two or three winters in that kind of society, nothing discomposed her.
"Robert," she said, with part of a glance, as Utie rejoined her, "you go to the punch-bowl too much. You reflect upon me, sir. Besides, I heard you quarrelling with that handsome officer. I am dying to know him. Who is he?"
Utie looked viciously up, anger and jealousy inflaming his heated face, for, although he had no engagement with Miss Rideau, he conceived himself her future suitor. But some rash words that he said against the officer were scarcely heard by the self-possessed beauty of official society, because, just then, the young officer and a friend were approaching them. She dropped her eyes when she met Lieutenant Dibdo's bold glance of admiration, perhaps in order not to be privy to the more searching look with which, like a gentleman of the world, he ran over the fine points of her plump body as he passed. But young Utie, seeing the offender of a moment ago taking such ardent and leisurely survey of the girl under his care, turned pale with hate. The officer did not notice him at all, absorbed in the fine colors, eyes, and proportions of Miss Rideau, and this further outraged Utie who—to his credit be it said—had only modest thoughts for her. When he saw, however, that she looked after the manly figure and naval gilt of him of the profane eyes, as if to return his admiration, the intoxicated boy dropped an oath.
"I will horsewhip that powder-monkey!" he said.
"Robert," said the girl placidly, "you won't. You have no horse and no horsewhip, but you have been drinking. Go from me, sir! Some one else shall see me home to-night."
"I will kill the man who takes my place! Do you dare to speak that way to me?"
He had raised his voice, in his rage, so that some others heard it. There was a little pause of pressing people, for that was a chivalrous age as to the manner of men to women, and the young officer, just then returning, availed himself of a pretty girl's dilemma to say:
"May I assist you, miss? I presume you are not in very agreeable company."
"Thank you, sir," answered Miss Rideau. "I would be obliged to have some one find my aunt for me; she is here somewhere."
"Will you accept a stranger's arm?"
"In this misfortune, I will."
Dibdo took off the pretty girl, and one of his naval companions, looking after him, exclaimed, "What a genius Dib. is with the ladies!" But the companion, feeling a trembling, unsteady hand upon his arm, turned about and met young Utie's desperate face. "I want to know the name of that fellow!" said Utie.
"That is Charles Dibdo," said the naval companion, "lieutenant of the United States frigate Fox, and I recommend you, my boy, to addresshimin a civil tone. For me, I never mind a drunken man."
Thoroughly demonized now, young Robert Utie turned blindly about for some implement of revenge. He found it in Tiltock, a fellow-clerk, a novitiate and a ninny, who was visible in the crowd.
"Tiltock, are you a man of honor?"
"I hope so, Bob."
"Can you carry a challenge?"
"Oh yes! I guess so, to 'blige a ole friend."
"Can you write it?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Then take it by word of mouth. That scoundrel there, Lieutenant Dibdo, has insulted a lady, and me too. I must have his blood. Follow him up, and meet me at Gadsby's with his answer."
Full of self-importance at this first and safe opportunity to stand upon what is known as "the field of honor," Tiltock kept the lieutenant in his eye, and took him finally aside and demanded a meeting in the name of Utie. The naval officer answered that he had simply relieved a lady from a drunken boy; but Tiltock, in the dramatic way common to halcyon old times, refused to accept either "drunken" or "boy" as terms appropriate to "the code," and pressed for an answer. In five minutes the naval officer replied, through his naval companion, that having ascertained Mr. Utie to be a gentleman's son, and he as an United States officer not being able to decline a challenge, the latter was accepted. The weapons were to be pistols, the place the usual ground at Bladensburg, and the time the afternoon of the next day.
There was a good deal of drinking and boasting at the hotels that night, Utie and Tiltock telling everybody, as a particular secret, that there was to be "an 'fah honah," otherwise a "juel," at "Bladensburg, sah!" The gin-drinking, cock-fighting, sporting element of the town was aroused, and Utie and Tiltock were invited on all sides to imbibe to the significant toast of "The Field." Very noisy, very insolent, nuisances indeed, these two mere lads—the offspring of a vain and ignorant social period of which some elements yet remain—borrowed the money to hire a carriage, and at midnight they set out with some associates by the old, rutty, clay road for the Maryland village of Bladensburg. That night they caroused until Nature, despite her revolt, put them to bed. In the morning, with a swollen and sallow face, dry hair,unsteady hands, aching eyes and dim vision, Robert Utie awoke to the recollection of his folly and his rashness, and he realized the critical period which he had provoked. His clerkship lost, his self-pride poignant, his pockets nearly empty, his respectable career irretrievably terminated, his sweetheart insulted, and his life in danger! There was no escape either from despair or fate. Tiltock was strutting about below stairs with a drunken old doctor, misnamed a surgeon, who deposited behind the bar a rusty case of surgical instruments, and who took a deep potation to the toast of "The fawchuns of waw." The Bladensburg people were well aware of the occasion, and the old tavern was surrounded by loafers and gossips, many of whom were boys who had walked out from the city as we go to prize-fights in our day. To fill up the time a dog-fight and a chicken-fight were improvised by the enterprising stable-boys in the back yard, on the green slopes of the running Branch. While Tiltock strutted out of town at an imposing pace to examine "The Field," Robert Utie retired to his room, sought with an emetic to relieve his stomach, and then sat down to write some letters and an epitaph. The paper was thin, and the pen and ink matched it, but the drunken boy's eyes marred more than all; for suddenly the secret fountains of his lost youth were touched as by the prick of his pen, and the drops gushed out upon the two words he had written:
"Dear mother—"
Not his sweetheart, who was nothing to him now; not his "honor," which had been only vain-glory and deceit; not any thing but this earliest, everlasting faith which is ours forever, whether we be steadfast or go astray: the tie of home, of childhood, and of our mother's prayer and kiss—this was the soft reproach which glided between a wasted youth and the "field of valor" he had tempted. He wept. He sobbed. He threw himself upon the bed, and pressing his temples into the ragged quilt, felt the panorama of childhood pass across his mind like something cool,sorrowful, and compassionate. The sicknessshehad cured, the bad wordsshehad taken from his undutiful lips, the whipping she had saved him from at the cost of her deceit, the lie she had never toldhim, the tears he had found her shedding upon her knees when first he had been drinking, the money he had never given her out of his salary but had spent with idlers, his ruined soul which to that mother's thought was pure as a baby's still, and watched by all the angels of God: these were admonitions from the green meadows of childhood. Before was the barren field of honor.
How short is the struggle betwixt youth and selfishness, that sum of all diseases and crimes; that selfishness out of which wars arise and hell is habitated!
A poor, overworked Christian negro, a slave in the tavern, hearing the sobbing of Robert Utie and aware that one of the duellists occupied that room, lifted the latch, and wakened the wretched boy from his remorse.
"Young moss," he said, "doan you fight no juels! Oh! doan do it, for de bressed Lord's sake! It's nuffin but pride and sin. Yo's only a pore, spilt boy, but you got a soul, young moss! Doan you go git kilt in dat ar bloody gully wha' so many gits hurt amoss to deff!"
Utie arose from the dream of home, and kicked the poor slave out of the room. He then drank, speculated upon his chances, practised with an imaginary pistol at the wall, and meditated running away, alternately, until Tiltock's business-step rang in the hall.
"Bob," he said, "we've picked you a beautiful piece of ground, and the other party's waiting. It's the most popular juel of the season."
They walked up the sandy village street, under the old hip-roofed houses, crossed the Branch bridge, and proceeded a quarter of a mile on the road to Washington. There, where a rivulet crossed the road amongst some bushes, they descended by a path into a copse, and on to a green meadow-space cleared away byformer rain freshets. Farm boys, town boys, and intruders of all sorts were lurking near. The field of honor resembled a gypsy camp.
Lieutenant Dibdo's companion came up to Tiltock and said that his friend did not wish to fight, and would make any manly apology, even though unconscious of offence, if the challenge was withdrawn. The crowd was ardent for the fight, and Tiltock, who was punctilious about honor, particularly where he could cut a safe figure, repelled the compromise, as "unwarranted by the code." He knew as much about the code as about honor, and more about both than about getting a living.
"Then," said the lieutenant, "I am authorized to say that my principal will take Mr. Utie's first fire. Let him improve the generous chance as he will. The second time we will make business of it."
The interlopers fell back. The word was given: "Ready—Aim—Fire!" Robert Utie, sustained by braggadocio, that quality which makes murderers die on the scaffold heroically, fired full at the body of Lieutenant Dibdo. That officer fired into the air and remained unmoved and unharmed.
"Is another shot demanded?"
"Yes," said Tiltock, "our honor is not yet satisfied."
He waved the crowd back in an imperious way—they having rushed in after the first shot—and he gave the word himself like a dramatic reading.
Robert Utie looked, and this time with a livid, sobered face, into the open pistol of the man he had provoked, the professional officer of death. The fine, cool face behind the pistol was concise, grave, and eloquent now as a judge's pronouncing the last sentence of the law. The next instant the boy was biting and clawing at the ground in mortal agony. The impatient crowd rushed in. A faint voice was heard to gasp for what some said was "water" and some thought was "mother." Then a figure with a dissipated face a little dignified by death, and with some of the softnessof childhood glimmering in it, like the bright footfall of the good angel whose mission was done and whose flight was taken—this figure lay upon its back amongst the bushes, under the sunshine, peeped at by distant hills, contemplated by idlers as if it were the body of a slain game-chicken, and the drunken "surgeon" was idiotically feeling for its heart.
"Gentlemen," said Tiltock with a flourish, "we are all witnesses that every thing has been honorably conducted."
The city had its little talk. The newspapers in those days were models of what is called high-toned journalism, and printed nothing on purely personal matters like duels when requested to respect the feelings of families. As if "the feelings of families" were not the main cause of duels! There was a mother somewhere, still clinging with her prayers to the footstool of God, hoping for the soul of her boy even after death and wickedness. This was all, except the revolution of the world, and the wedding in due time upon it of Lieutenant Dibdo and Miss Rideau. It was what was called a romantic wedding.
I.