me classic, but
the jury found for manslaughter. It had the effect of discouraging the
Greenfields claim, but Amos used to sit on the headgate just the same,
as quaint and lone a figure as the sandhill crane watching for water
toads below the Tule drop. Every subsequent owner of Greenfields bought
it with Amos in full view. The last of these was Diedrick. Along in
August of that year came a week of low water. Judson's ditch failed and
he went out with his rifle to learn why. There on the headgate sat
Diedrick's frau with a long-handled shovel across her lap and all the
water turned into Diedrick's ditch; there she sat knitting through the
long sun, and the children brought out her dinner. It was all up with
Amos; he was too much of a gentleman to fight a lady--that was the way
he expressed it. She was a very large lady, and a long-handled shovel is
no mean weapon. The next year Judson and Diedrick put in a modern water
gauge and took the summer ebb in equal inches. Some of the water-right
difficulties are more squalid than this, some more tragic; but unless
you have known them you cannot very well know what the water thinks as
it slips past the gardens and in the long slow sweeps of the canal. You
get that sense of brooding from the confined and sober floods, not all
at once but by degrees, as one might become aware of a middle-aged and
serious neighbor who has had that in his life to make him so. It is the
repose of the completely accepted instinct.

With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The
willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest
provocation. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the
dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the water beyond its appointed
bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the
willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they
will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation of
the willows that so little else finds growing-room along the large
canals. The birch beginning far back in the canon tangles is more
conservative; it is shy of man haunts and needs to have the permanence
of its drink assured. It stops far short of the summer limit of waters,
and I have never known it to take up a position on the banks beyond the
ploughed lands. There is something almost like premeditation in the
avoidance of cultivated tracts by certain plants of water borders. The
clemati