By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had become detested in their own community, and when they sued O'Day, or Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled, and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw, - now a man in growth and of Celtic vindictiveness, - loaded his gun and started for Cannon's Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off the ferry scow.

"Are you going to give me back that ten dollars, you old scoundrel?" shouted O'Day.

"Stand back! stand back!" answered long Jacob; "the quotient was correct; the lex loci and the lex terrae were argued. The lex talionis"

"Take it!" cried the villain, adroitly firing his shot-gun into the merchant's breast, so as not to injure his humaner beast.

Jacob Cannon staggered to the fence at the head of the wharf, and caught there a moment, and fell dead.

"You scoundrel," screamed Isaac Cannon from the window, "to kill my brother, my executive comfort."

"Yes," answered O'Day, "and I'll give the other barrel to you!"

As Isaac Cannon barricaded himself in, Owen O'Day collected his effects without hurry, and betook himself to the wilds of Missouri.

Cannon's Ferry fell into decay when the railroad at Seaford carried off its trading importance, but there are yet to be seen the never tenanted mansion of the disappointed bridegroom, and the gravestones which show how Jacob's fate frightened Isaac Cannon to a speedy tomb.

In the meantime, John M. Clayton had made use of the fears of Calhoun and his nullifiers, who were menaced with the penalties of treason by the president, to pass a great protective tariff bill by their aid, thus establishing the manufactures in the same period with the railways.

This triumph in the senate left him free to conduct the suit of Randel against the Canal Company, which occupied as many years as the railroad enterprise of Meshach Milburn.

The barbarous system of "pleadings" was then in full vogue, though soon to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton's pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous of him, had yet to decide in his favor.

Then, after the lapse of years, the issue came to trial at the old Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems - something that would be going on at the final end of the world.

"Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy! he don't know a Delaware jury. I'll get my country-seat, up here on the New Castle hills, out of this case," Clayton said, as he pitched quoits with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.