* * * * *

"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 conclusio