and electricity as means of locomotion. The canals will lose the
bright-coloured barges which are to-day their most striking feature, and
the population that has so long floated over their surface. Life will be
duller and more monotonous. The canal population, so long distinct, will
be merged in the rest of the community. The tug will displace the
tow-rope. The pullers will be housed on land, mastering the three R's
instead of learning to strain at the girth.

But there is still a brief period left during which the canal population
may be seen in its original primitive existence, devoted to the barge,
which is the only home known to six or seven thousand families, and
traversing the water roads of their country in unceasing and endless
progression. There is nothing like it in any other country of Europe.
Venice has its water routes, but the gondola is not a domicile. There was
a canal population in England, but, like much else in our modern life, it
has lost whatever picturesqueness it might once have claimed. For a true
canal population, bright and happy, living the same life from father to
son and generation to generation, we must go to Holland. There these
inland navigators ply their vocation with only one ambition, and that to
become the owner of a tjalk, and to rear thereon a family of towers. It is
said that the life is one that requires the consumption of unlimited
quantitics of 'schnapps,' and the humidity of the atmosphere is undoubted.
But even free libations do not diminish the prosperity of the bargees.
They are a thriving race, and it must also be noted to their credit that
they are well behaved, and not given to quarrels. Collisions on the
thickly-covered canals are rare; malicious collisions are unknown. The
barges pass and repass without hindrance, the tow-ropes never get
entangled, there is mutual forbearance, and the skill derived from long
experience in slipping the ropes uncler the barges does the rest. The
conditions under which the canal population exists and thrives are a