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; there _is_
something 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 next time 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 to be
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
arms of 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 with hamlets,
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
passionate word 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 Crist_ene_), 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 word _dead-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
time is 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 aspired to 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, and portly
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 of the 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. The spiritual 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 thrumming clocks 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 pensive and 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!