“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