where to go next?"

It was a balmy, sunshiny May day. While the girls rested on the park
benches they could see, far off, a line of ships sailing up the bay and
also the larger freight steamers. They were near one of the quiet
canals that formed an inlet from the great Chesapeake Bay. Lining the
banks of the canal were numbers of coal barges and canal boats.

On the deck of a canal boat a girl came out with a bundle of clothes in
her arms. She was singing in a high, sweet voice as she hung them on a
line strung across the deck of the boat.

The girls watched her silently as she flitted back and forth, and she
sang on, unconscious of her audience. She was singing a boat song
which the men chant as they row home at the close of day. The pathos
in the woman's voice was so exquisite, its notes so true, that Madge's
blue eyes filled with tears. None of the four friends stirred until
the song was over, and the girl in her faded calico dress and bare feet
had disappeared into the cabin of the boat.

"We call those boats shanty boats down in Virginia," Eleanor said; "I
suppose because the little cabin on the deck of the canal boat looks so
like a shanty."

"People live on those shanty boats," announced Madge.

"Yes, we have noticed it, my dear girl," Phil responded dryly. But
there was a question in her eyes as she looked at Madge.

"Shanty boats do not look exactly like house-boats," went on Madge