t caps upon their gray hair, then I do not complain if the
drink is brought me by some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of
Washington Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors
my diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty awkwardness while she
waits till I have done drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as I
lounge through the barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their
family affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the
elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for
a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in
the sun before the gate. At all the places, I have the people keep bees,
and, in the garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable
world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a great bed in
which the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of
delicate spray hanging over it. I walk unmolested through the farmer's
tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of his voluble
mowing-machine, and learn to my heart's content that his name begins with
Van, and that his family has owned that farm ever since the days of the
Patroon; which I dare say is not true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of
the hayfield, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal beside that
wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only, because they
are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and
half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his anatomical
interest. The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the
rudder swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can step
on. She is laden with flour from the valley of the Genesee, and may have
started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly
manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a fiery-haired lady of
imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I explore, is plainly furnished
with a cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane language is
allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide
imperceptibly down the canal, unvexed by the far-off future of arrival.

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes, but I am aware that
less superficial spirits could not be satisfied with them, and I can not
pretend that my wedding-journeyers were so.

They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape; they invited themselve