too, sometimes shed bitter
tears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do,
tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth,
knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the fact
that they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut off
the sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without the
shirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.

There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys' hearts when they
went in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitly
forbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took the
course of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled the
home hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law and
been forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bank
and called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and it
covered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, as
children do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, he
fully expiated; and I will whisper to the Young People here at the end
of the chapter, that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, and
insist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning,
but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as our
thoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen so
and so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened to
happen to me when I had done wrong.

IV.

THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN.

THE canal came from Lake Erie, two hundred miles to the northward, and
joined the Ohio River twenty miles south of the Boy's Town. For a time
my boy's father was collector of tolls on it, but even when he was old
enough to understand that his father held this State office (the canal
belonged to the State) because he had been such a good Whig, and
published the Whig newspaper, he could not grasp the notion of the
distance which the canal-boats came out of and went into. He saw them
come and he saw them go; he did not ask whence or whither; his wonder,
if he had any about them, did not go beyond the second lock. It was hard
enough to get it to the head of the Basin, which left the canal half a
mile or so to the eastward, and stretched down into the town, a sheet of
smooth water, fifteen or twenty feet deep, and a hundred wide; his sense
ached with, the effort of conceiving