"Goy! there's nothing like it," said Clayton.
Not far from this point the canal passed an old church and graveyard at a bridge where Mr. Clayton said his namesake, the revolutionary Governor of Delaware, was buried. Here Randel's plain conveyance took them in, and in the moonlight they drove a few miles to Mr. Randel's estate, near the banks of a river, under a long table-mountain of barren clay and iron stain, on the farther shore.
"Here," said Randel, "is my future estate of Randalia. Here I shall see all the commerce of the canal passing by, and garnishee every vessel that pays my tolls to the Canal Company."
"Randel," asked Mr. Clayton, "what were those stakes I saw some distance back, running north and south across the fields?"
"A railroad survey."
"Who is making it?"
"They say Meshach Milburn, of Princess Anne."
"Goy!" exclaimed Clayton, "I'll beat him."
For two or three days the three men, still studying the canal suit, drove over a picturesque country, visiting the old manor of the Labadists and their Bohemian patron, Augustine Herman, the homestead of the late treaty minister, Bayard, and the ancient Welsh Baptist churches among the hills of the Elk and Christiana, where some of Cromwell's warriors lay. It was the favorite land of Whitefield, and in the neighborhood was an iron furnace Judge Custis examined with melancholy interest, as one of the investments of General Washington's father more than a hundred years before, when the Indians made the iron. They also went to Turkey Point, where the British army was disembarked to capture Philadelphia, and Knyphausen's division obliterated the history of Delaware by carrying her records away from Newcastle. Returning from one of these pleasant journeys, two messages from different points seared Judge Custis's eyeballs: