After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, to
Mr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks,
and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles through
a mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.
The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towed
them out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite a
willowy island, and where an embryo "city" had been started in the
marshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr.
Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressive
countenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fierce
gestures.
"Clayton," said he, sitting on a stone lock in the evening gloaming, "I
ought to have been a lawyer. Not that I am not the greatest theoretical
engineer in the country, but my legal genius interposes, and I sue the
villains who employ me."
Here he gave the melancholy negro a violent shaking, who took it as
stolidly as a bottle of medicine shaken by the doctor.
"Yes, you sued Judge Ben Wright and he nonsuited you."
"I tell you a new axiom, Clayton," the earnest engineer cried, putting
the negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs genius
has to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. He
deflects genius from its full expression, absorbs the virtue from it,
and is a fraud.
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