iles an hour, and the team came
swinging down the tow-path at a gallant trot, the driver sitting the
hindmost horse of three, and cracking his long-lashed whip with loud
explosions, as he whirled its snaky spirals in the air. All the boys in
town were there, meekly proud to be ordered out of his way, to break and
fly before his volleyed oaths and far before his horses' feet; and
suddenly the captain pressed his foot on the spring and released the
tow-rope. The driver kept on to the stable with unslackened speed, and
the line followed him, swishing and skating over the water, while the
steersman put his helm hard aport, and the packet rounded to, and swam
softly and slowly up to her moorings. No steamer arrives from Europe now
with such thrilling majesty.

The canal-boatmen were all an heroic race, and the boys humbly hoped
that some day, if they proved worthy, they might grow up to be drivers;
not indeed packet-drivers; they were not so conceited as that; but
freight-boat drivers, of two horses, perhaps, but gladly of one. High or
low, the drivers had a great deal of leisure, which commended their
calling to the boyish fancy; and my boy saw them, with a longing to
speak to them, even to approach them, never satisfied, while they amused
the long summer afternoon in the shade of the tavern by a game of skill
peculiar to them. They put a tack into a whiplash, and then, whirling it
round and round, drove it to the head in a target marked out on the
weather-boarding. Some of them had a perfect aim; and in fact it was a
very pretty feat, and well worth seeing.

Another feat, which the pioneers of the region had probably learned from
the Indians, was throwing the axe. The thrower caught the axe by the end
of the helve, and with a dextrous twirl sent it flying through the air,
and struck its edge into whatever object he aimed at--usually a tree.
Two of the Basin loafers were brothers, and they were always quarrelling
and often fighting. One was of the unhappy fraternity of town-drunkards,
and somehow the boys thought him a finer fellow than the other, whom
somehow they considered "mean," and they were always of his side in
their controversies. One afternoon these brothers quarrelled a long
time, and then the sober brother retired to the doorway of a pork-house,
where he stood, probably brooding upon his injuries, when the drunkard,
who had remained near the tavern, suddenly caught up an axe and flung
it; the boys saw it sail a