ybody'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