On his return from an absence of two years in the North the great Canal was completed and, while his early impression of the unparallelled magnitude of the Queen City had suffered revision, his visions of journeying by canal were yet to be realized.  At the foot of Eighth Street, Richmond, he took the packet-boat, passed under Seventh Street bridge, and with the other passengers lingered on deck to see Richmond slowly disappear in the distance.  That night the doleful packet-horn, contrasted with his memory of the cheerful, musical note of the old stage-horn, brought to the lad his first realization of the inadequacies of modern improvements.

Ascending the James the traveller had a view of the best of the old Virginia life, its wealth of beauty, its home comfort, its atmosphere of serenity, of old memories, rich and vivid, like the wine that lay cob-webbed in ancestral cellars, of gracious hospitality, of a softly tinted life like the color in old pictures and the soul in old books.  The gentle humorist lived to see that life pass away from the Old Dominion and all too soon he vanished into another world where, like all true Virginians, he expected to find the old home-life again.

These canal days were in the early Dickens period, and occasionally the youthful traveller could not resist the temptation to go below and lose himself in those pages which had then almost as potent a charm in their novelty as they have now in their friendly familiarity.  But the river-isle, which held an interest in futurity for him because of his intention to found a romance there when he should be “big enough to write for the papers,” would draw him back to the deck.  There was a path across the hills that the passengers must follow, disembarking for that purpose.  Near Manchester was a haunted house which he looked upon with those ghostly shivers that made a person so delightfully uncomfortable, for he, like the rest of us, did believe in ghosts, whatever he might say to the contrary.  There was the ruined mill and, best of all, the Three-Mile Lock, inspiring him with the highest ambition of his life, to be a lock-keeper.  Then came Richmond; the metropolis of the world, to the young voyager.

[Illustration:  DR. GEORGE W. BAGBY From the portrait in the possession of the family]

Dr. Bagby studied for his profession at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania and from there went to Lynchburg, opening an office where now stands the opera house.  Unfortunately for his professional career but happily for the cause of the literature of Virginia life, the office of the Lynchburg Virginian was near, and its editor, Mr. James McDonald, proved a kindred soul to the young physician.  In the absences of the editor, Dr. Bagby filled his chair and fell a victim to the fascination with which the Demon of the Fourth Estate lures his chosen to their doom.  In Lynchburg he first found his true calling and there, too, he met with his first failure, the demise of the Lynchburg Express, of which he was part owner, and which went to the wall by reason of the well-known weakness of genius in regard to business matters.