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