its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next
eight-mile "shift"--sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand
and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object
other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even
heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family
hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its
floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and
a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet,
whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are
brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps
yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a
barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no
more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the
ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new
peculiar spell in such association--old quarries, the rusting tramways
choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly
about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself
with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the
moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is
thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first
made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely
combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past
with her own sibyl-line mystery.

The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir
Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of
which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were
growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling
leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of
forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad