Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

“I am no attorney,” I try to console her, “but his case sounds doubtful.” “If he goes ahead,” warns Mr. Edgewise, “obtains a warrant, pays the caution money, has title, then it’s his, if no one can prove the land isn’t escheatable.” All now fall to arguing about Land-Jobbery, the discussion growing at times spirited and personal. Everyone in the Coach, it seems, has suddenly become a Philadelphia Lawyer. “Why,” Mrs. Edgewise demands to know, “must this subject rouse quite so much Passion?” The Purveyor of Delusion confers upon his wife a certain expression or twist of Phiz I daresay as old as Holy Scripture,— a lengthy range of Sentiment, all comprest into a single melancholick swing of the eyes. From some personal stowage he produces another Flask, containing, not the Spruce Beer ubiquitous in these parts, but that favor’d stupefacient of the jump’d-up tradesman, French claret,— and without offering it to anyone else, including his Wife, begins to drink. “It goes back,” he might have begun, “to the second Day of Creation, when ‘G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the Waters which were above the Firmament,’— thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.”