and to determine that, until the certificate should be corrected, the vacant land therein comprized should not be liable to proclamation:     That although there is manifest hardship in the present case; although the chancellor is disposed, as much as he can with propriety, to discountenance all attempts to preclude a man from the fruits of his honest industry and attention, and although he is impowered to decide all disputes in the land office on the principles established in the court of chancery, he is obliged by the positive law of the land, to decide that vacant land, comprehended in any certificate whatever, must be compounded for within one year from the date of the warrant; that as, in the present case, the caveator did not compound within one year from the date of his warrant, the vacant land comprehended in his certificate was liable to be taken by the first person who applied for a warrant to affect the same, notwithstanding the leave given by the late chancellor to correct the certificate; and that the defendant Thomas Gassaway, being the person who so applied, was entitled to the warrant which issued in his favour.     It is therefore adjudged, ordered and decreed, this fourth day of May 1790, that the caveat of Lawrence Oneale be dismissed.                                         A. C. HANSON, Chancellor. ¾¾ The following adjudications are to be understood as being,     also, signed by chancellor Hanson, until the reader is     otherwise informed. ¾¾ To the honourable the judges of the general court.     BY the act of 1784, ch. 55, sec. 9, the intendant was authorised to sell the reserves in Harford county. By the twelfth section of the same act, it was directed, that the tenants on manors, and settlers on reserves, should have a preference of purchasing the parts they possessed.     A, B, and C, as settlers on the said reserves make application to the intendant claiming, their right of preemption, and offering to bond for the purchase money: D also makes application on the same ground for the same land:¾     The intendant, in order to have a tribunal for ascertaining the rights of preemption, had directed a meeting of the settlers on reserves in Harford county, to elect three persons, who should determine on all disputes respecting such rights: Three persons had been chosen accordingly, and it was the practice of the intendant to make sale agreeably to their determination.¾Those three persons, however, did not decide