house. This resemblance is certainly heightened by the custom of colouring
the barges, which are always painted a bright colour, red or green being
perhaps the most usual. As ornament there is usually a good deal of
brasswork; the handle of the tiller is generally bordered with the metal,
and the owner seems to take pride in nailing brass along the bulwarks of
his boat where it is not wanted and is even little seen. It has been
suggested that the polishing of these brass plates or bars provides a
pleasant change from the dull routine work of towing. The brightness of
the paint and the brasswork constitutes the pride of the barge-owners, and
supplies a standard of comparison among them.

To increase the homelike aspect of this water residence, birds and plants,
always in more or less quantity and variety, are to be seen either in the
windows or on the deck. The poorest bargee, which generally means the
youngest or the beginner, will have one song-bird in a gilt cage, and as
he accumulates money in his really profitable calling, he will add to his
collection of birds a row of flowers and bulbs in pots. Thus he says, with
a glow of satisfaction, 'I possess an aviary and a garden, like my cousin
Hans on the polders, although my home is on the moving waters.' To
strengthen the illusion what does he do but fix a toy gate on the poop
above his sleeping-cabin, and thus cherishes the belief that he is on his
own domain? In the evening, when the towing is over for the day, the women
bring out their sewing, the children play round the tiller, and the good
man smokes his immense pipe with complete and indolent satisfaction. And
so day passes on to day without a variation, and life runs by without a
ripple or a murmur for the canal population, while the mere landsmen look
on with envy at what seems to them an idyllic existence, and even ladies
of breeding and high station have been known to declare that they would
gladly change places with the mistress of the bargee's quarter-deck. That
was no doubt in the days before women had to take on themselves the brunt