3

The passing of us by a packet brought me my first grief.  She came up behind us with her horses at the full trot.  Their boat was down the canal a hundred yards or so at the end of the tow-line; and just before the boat itself drew even with ours she was laid over by her steersman to the opposite side of the ditch, her horses were checked so as to let her line so slacken as to drop down under our boat, her horses were whipped up by a sneering boy on a tall bay steed, her team went outside ours on the tow-path, and the passage was made.  They made, as was always the case, a moving loop of their line, one end hauled by the packet, and the other by the team.  I was keeping my eye skinned to see how the thing was done, when the tow-line of the packet came by, tripped me up and threw me into the canal, from which I was fished out by Bill as our boat came along.  There was actual danger in this unless the steersman happened to be really steering, and laid the boat off so as to miss me.

Captain Sproule gazed at me in disgust.  Ace laughed loudly away out ahead on the horse.  Bill said that if it had been in the middle of the ocean I never would have been shamed by being hauled up on deck.  He was sorry for my sake, as I never would live this thing down.

“Go change your clothes,” said the captain, “and try not to be such a lummox next time.”

I had no change of clothes, and therefore, I took the first opportunity to get out on the tow-path, wet as I was, and begin again to learn my first trade.  It was a lively occupation.  There were some four thousand boats on the Erie Canal at that time, or an average of ten boats to the mile.  I suppose there were from six to eight thousand boys driving then on the “Grand Canal” alone, as it was called.  More than half of these boys were orphans, and it was not a good place for any boy, no matter how many parents or guardians he might have.  Five hundred or more convicts in the New York State Penitentiary were men who, as I learned from a missionary who came aboard to pray with us, sing hymns and exhort us to a better life, had been canal-boat drivers.  The boys were at the mercy of their captains, and were often cheated out of their wages.  There were stories of young boys sick with cholera, when that disease was raging, or with other diseases, being thrown off the boats and allowed to live or die as luck might determine.  There were hardship, danger and oppression in the driver’s life; and every sort of vice was like an open book before him as soon as he came to understand it—­which, at first, I did not.  If my mother knew, as I suppose she did, what sort of occupation I had entered upon, I do not see how she could have been anything but miserable as she thought of me—­though she realized keenly from what I had escaped.

Back on the tow-path, I was earning the contempt of Ace by dodging every issue, like a candidate for office.  I learned quickly to snub the boat by means of a rope and the numerous snubbing-posts along the canal.  This was necessary in stopping, in entering locks, and in rounding some curves; and my first glimmer of courage came from the fact that I seemed to know at once how this was to be done—­the line to be passed twice about the post, and so managed as to slip around it with a great deal of friction so as to bring her to.