nter at will up and down
the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard gates, and sit upon the porches
or thresholds, and am served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies
who have done their morning's work and have leisure to be knitting or
sewing; or if there are no old ladies, with decent 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