But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed
as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest
suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety
of trees as along our old canal--cedars and hemlocks and hickory
dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of
silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all
along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash,
and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I
ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in
which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant
grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and
the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their
glimmering recesses.

No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like
happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human
event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a
moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully
across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were
billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the
time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took
a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the
landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now,
as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour
in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things
back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal.

"What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the
romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on