MORTGAGES.
The Legislature of Pennsylvania, at their late session, passed the following act relative to Mortgages.
Sect. 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in general assembly met, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That from and after the first day of October next, all mortgages, or defeasible deeds in the nature of mortgages, made or to be made or executed for any lands, tenements or hereditaments within this commonwealth, shall have a priority according to the date of recording the same, without regard to the time of making or executing such deeds. And it shall be the duty of the recorder to endorse the time upon the mortgages or defeasible deeds when left for record, and to number the same according to the time they are left for record, and if two or more are left upon the same day, they shall have priority according to the time they are left at the office for record. And that no mortgage, or defeasible deed in the nature of a mortgage, shall be a lien until such mortgage or defeasible deed shall have been recorded, or left for record as aforesaid. Provided, That no mortgage given for the purchase money of the land so mortgaged shall be affected by the passage of this act, if the same be recorded within sixty days from the execution thereof.
Sect. 2. And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That the governor be, and he is hereby requested to cause this act to be published immediately after the passage of the same, in such newspapers and for such a length of time as he may think most proper for the information of the citizens of this commonwealth.
Whimsical conflict.—It would be well for society, if all duellists were to find themselves in the same predicament as did the celebrated poet, Dr. Akenside, and a gentleman of the bar by the name of Ballow. A challenge had passed from the former—but they did not get into the field; for one would not consent to fight in the morning, and the other was equally determined not to do so in the evening! The one wished to fall in a blaze of glory, mingled with the brilliant rays of the rising sun, a very fanciful and poetic notion; and the other, with perhaps an equal degree of poetic feeling and imagination, thought the shades of eve more congenial with the work of death and the hour of dissolution. Whether serious or affected, the difference was perhaps a happy one for the lovers of literature, who might otherwise have lost the keen and inexpressible delight which ever flows from the perusal of Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination—a work which will charm and instruct mankind through every age, so long as learning, taste, and genius, shall have a votary or a favourite to relish so rich a banquet. The hand of blood, that had deprived the republic of letters of that incomparable poem, would have well deserved everlasting execration.
[Plough Boy.