young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of
Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how
much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as
clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters."
A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns
and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty
years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the
Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal
is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the
manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it
as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to
believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has
its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware
River.

One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's
own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for
instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe
that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would
survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all
that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons
less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are
names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no
doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads.
Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should
not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I
now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of
places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for
damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers.