is
meal and looked fiercely at me as if to deny that he had ever been kind.
When the meal was over he ordered Ace to the tow-path, and told him to
take me along and show me how to drive.

"Here," he snapped at me, "is where we make a spoon or spoil a horn. Go
'long with you!"

Ace climbed on the back of one of the horses. I looked up wondering what
I was to do.

"You'll walk," said Ace; "an' keep your eyes skinned."

So we started off. Each horse leaned into the collar, and slowly the
hundred tons or so of dead weight started through the water. The team
knew that it was of no use to surge against the load to get it started,
as horses do with a wagon; but they pulled steadily and slowly,
gradually getting the boat under way, and soon it was moving along with
the team at a brisk walk, and with less labor than a hundredth part of
the weight would have called for on land. I have always believed in
inland waterways for carrying the heavy freight of this nation; because
the easiest and cheapest way to transport anything is to put it in the
water and float it. This lesson I learned when Ace whipped up Dolly and
Jack and took our craft off toward Syracuse.

It was a hard day for me. We were passing boats all the time, and we had
to make speed to keep craft which had no right to pass us from getting
by, especially just before reaching a lock. To allow another boat to
steal our lockage from us was a disgrace; and many of the fights between
the driver boys grew out of the rights oL passing by and the struggle to
avoid delays at the locks. Sometimes such affairs were not settled by
the boys on the tow-path--they fought off the skirmishes; the real
battles were between the captains or members of the crews.

If there were rules I don't know now what they were, and nobody paid
much attention to them. Of course we let the passenger boats pass
whenever they overtook us, unless we could beat them into a lock. We
delayed them then by laying our boat out into the middle of the canal
and quarreling until we reached the lock; under cover maybe of some
pretended mistake. Our laying the boat out to shut off a passing rival
was dangerous to the slow boat, for the reason that a collision meant
that the strongly-built stem-end of the boat coming up from behind could
crush the weaker stern of the obstructing craft. Such are some of the
things I had to learn.

3

The passing of us by a packet brought me my first grief. She came up
be