by fishes, and whose sides are
brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps
yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a
barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no
more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the
ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new
peculiar spell in such association--old quarries, the rusting tramways
choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly
about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself
with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the
moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is
thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first
made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely
combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past
with her own sibyl-line mystery.

The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir
Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of
which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were
growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling
leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of
forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad
young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of
Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how
much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as
clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters."
A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns
and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty
years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the
Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal
is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the
manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it
as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to
believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has
its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware
River.

One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's
own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for