Delaware Bay is an expansive inland sea, subject to fierce storms, and broadening on its eastern side into Maurice River Cove, noted for its oysters. A deep ship channel conducts commerce through the centre of the bay, marked by lighthouses built out on mid-bay shoals, and, as the shores approach, by range lights on the banks, the Delaware Bay and River being regarded as the best marked and lighted stream in the country. Up at the head of the bay, years ago, a ship loaded with peas and beans sank, and this in time made at first a shoal, and afterwards an island, since known as the "Pea Patch." Here and on the adjacent shores the Government has lately erected formidable forts, which make, with their torpedo stations in the channel, a complete system of defensive works in the Delaware, first put into active occupation during the Spanish War of 1898, as a protection against a hostile fleet entering the river. Over in the "Diamond State" of Delaware, near here, on the river shore, is the aged town of Newcastle, quiet and yet attractive, having in operation, and evidently to the popular satisfaction, the whipping-post and stocks, a method of punishment which is a terror to all evil-doers, and is said to be most successful in preventing crime, as thieves and marauders give Newcastle a wide berth. This was originally a Swedish settlement, the standard of the great Gustavus Adolphus being unfurled there in 1640, when it was called Sandhuken, or Sandy Hook, it being a point of land jutting out between two little creeks. The Dutch soon captured it, changing the name to New Amstel; and about 1670 the settlement, then containing nearly a hundred houses, became New Castle, under English auspices. The northern boundary of the State of Delaware, dividing it from Pennsylvania, is an arc of a circle, made by a radius of twelve miles described around the old Court House at Newcastle, which still has in its tower the bell presented by Queen Anne. MASON AND DIXON'S LINE.