Interregnum: He's not a surveyor. He's a very naughty boy.

"I am told of certain Stars, ...which are invisible so long as they keep moving, being only seen when they pause."

My girlfriend is kind of awesome.  I'm sure lots of people say this, but I have proof.  If you can name anyone else who would willingly  spend the day after Christmas walking around a graveyard in 30 degree weather, I will  give you a cookie.  Which she baked.  Which makes her even more awesome.

It is a supreme irony, I was told by a very cold ticket-taker at the entrance to Christchurch Cemetery, that Charles Mason was a surveyor, but that no one has any idea where his grave is.  That's how I learn that whichever stone is Mason's, it's too weathered to read.  That's how he learns that Mason was an astronomer, not a surveyor.  That's how my girlfriend learned she should have stayed home.  To his credit the ticket-taker is as gracious as the weather allows.  He asks if we have read the novel.  We have.  He asks if we know the song.  We do.  he gives us our change.  We wander around and look at the stones.

Christchurch is the burial site of four signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Benjamin Rush, the father of american psychiatry, and Benjamin Franklin, who was Benjamin Franklin.  There are commodores and religious leaders and Biddles.  One of their family is buried in Macau.  Another pitches for the Phillies.

Charles Mason was born in a town called Stroud in Gloucestershire in 1728.  He died in Philadelphia in 1786.  He was born the son of a baker and died a fellow of the Royal Society, and had a crater on the moon named after him.  That's not a bad life by any stretch of the imagination.


We'll return to the history of the line next time.