as already fascinated by
these kidnappers? He has taken his horse and gone back to Patty
Cannon's."

The suit against the Canal Company required a great deal of research, as
law-books were then scarce, and precedents for breaches of contract
against corporations were not many; this form of legal life being
comparatively modern in that day, like the dawn of the floral age, or
before megatheriums grazed above the trees or iguanodons swam in the
canals. Clayton and Custis walked and ate and lay down together,
comparing knowledge and suggestions, and the litigious mind of John
Randel, Junior, was rather irritating to both of them, so that, to be
rid of his society in Dover, the two lawyers, meantime supplied with
money by Meshach Milburn's draft, resolved to visit the canal, which was
distant about thirty miles.

The three men started together in a carriage, after breakfast, on a soft
yet frosty morning, such as often gives to this region a winter sparkle
and mildness like the Florida climate. They passed several tidal creeks,
as the Duck and the Little Duck, the Blackbird and the Apoquinimink,
and, as they advanced, the barns became larger, the hedges more tasteful
and trimmed like those in the French Netherlands, the leafless peach
orchards stretched out like the tea-plants in China. Two or three little
towns studded the roadside, the woods gave way altogether to smaller
farms, and, at a steep bottom called the Fiddler's Bridge, they turned
across the fields to an old four-chimneyed, galleried mansion, at the
end of a long lane, and near a great stagnant pond, where John Randel,
Junior, as he fully named himself on every occasion, had a fine dinner
spread.

After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, to
Mr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks,
and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles through
a mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.

The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towed
them out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite a
willowy island, and where an embryo "city" had been started in the
marshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr.
Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressive
countenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fierce
gestures.

"Clayton," said