ns, and the bond of friendship between
himself and Dixon was that of two unequal minds admiring the
superiorities of each other. They had already proceeded together to
the Cape of Good Hope on two occasions to study an eclipse and an
occultation. Mason liked Dixon for his ready spirits, almost
improvident courage, speed with details, and worldly bearing. Though
little is known of their memories now, because they left us no
prolific records and spent much of the period of service among us in
the midst of the wilderness or in the reticence required for
mathematical calculation, yet they were the successors of Washington
in the surveying of the Alleghany ridges. Their survey was reliable;
the line was true. How much superior does it stand to-day to the line
of thirty degrees thirty minutes, which is the next great political
parallel below it, and was partly run only a few years afterwards! Up
to their line for the next hundred years flowed the waters of slavery,
but sent no human drop beyond, which did not evaporate in the free
light of a milder sun. God speed the surveyor, whoever he be, who
plants the stakes of a tranquil commonwealth and leaves them to be
the limit of bad principles, the pioneer line of good ones!

"Charles Mason had spent many years of his life, up to his old age,
experimenting with timepieces of his own invention. Many years before,
Sir Isaac Newton had called the attention of the British Government to
the necessity for an accurate portable time-keeper at sea, to
determine longitude, and in 1714 Parliament offered a reward of 20,000
pounds sterling for such a chronometer. Thenceforward for fifty years
the inventive spirits of England and the Continent were secretly at
work to produce a timepiece which would deserve the large reward,
amongst them Charles Mason, who labored with such perfect discretion
and uncommunicative self-reliance that none knew, none will ever know,
the motive principle he employed or the enginery he devised. While he
was working at this survey, near the spot at which we stand, the Board
of Award gave the L20,000 to one John Harrison, almost at the very
instant when Mason and Dixon's line was begun. This you can confirm by
any history of Horology. Charles Mason lived down to the year 1787,
surviving Dixon, who had died in England ten years previously, and he
was known to say to the end of his days, to people resident in
Philadelphia, that a child had eaten up L20,000 belonging to