In these days there are few people who know that a journey on a canal is the pleasantest journey in the world.  A canal has to go through fine scenery.  It cannot exist unless it follow through the valley of a stream.  The movement is so easy that, with your eyes shut, you do not know you move.  The route is so direct, that when you are once shielded from the sun, you are safe for hours.  You draw, you read, you write, or you sew, crochet, or knit.  You play on your flute or your guitar, without one hint of inconvenience.  At a “low bridge” you duck your head lest you lose your hat,—­and that reminder teaches you that you are human.  You are glad to know this, and you laugh at the memento.  For the rest of the time you journey, if you are “all right” within, in elysium.

I rode one of those horses perhaps two or three hours a day.  At locks I made myself generally useful.  At night I walked the deck till one o’clock, with my pipe or without it, to keep guard against the lock-thieves.  The skipper asked me sometimes, after he found I could “cipher,” to disentangle some of the knots in his bills of lading for him.  But all this made but a little inroad in those lovely autumn days, and for the eight days that we glided along,—­there is one blessed level which is seventy miles long,—­I spent most of my time with Fausta.  We walked together on the tow-path to get our appetites for dinner and for supper.  At sunrise I always made a cruise inland, and collected the gentians and black alder-berries and colored leaves, with which she dressed Mrs. Grill’s table.  She took an interest in my wretched sketch-book, and though she did not and does not draw well, she did show me how to spread an even tint, which I never knew before.  I was working up my French.  She knew about as much and as little as I did, and we read Mad.  Reybaud’s Clementine together, guessing at the hard words, because we had no dictionary.

Dear old Grill offered to talk French at table, and we tried it for a few days.  But it proved he picked up his pronunciation at St. Catherine’s, among the boatmen there, and he would say shwo for “horses,” where the book said chevaux.  Our talk, on the other hand, was not Parisian,—­but it was not Catherinian,—­and we subsided into English again.

So sped along these blessed eight days.  I told Fausta thus much of my story, that I was going to seek my fortune in New York.  She, of course, knew nothing of me but what she saw, and she told me nothing of her story.

But I was very sorry when we came into the basin at Troy, for I knew then that in all reason I must take the steamboat down.  And I was very glad,—­I have seldom in my life been so glad,—­when I found that she also was going to New York immediately.  She accepted, very pleasantly, my offer to carry her trunk to the Isaac Newton for her, and to act as her escort to the city.  For me, my trunk,

                      “in danger tried,”
    Swung in my hand,—­“nor left my side.”