wn causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the
surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown
gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations. So the
old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in
the lonelier country districts of England. We were curious as to the
meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that
remained of the old Genesee Canal. Thirty years ago, this moat had
brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between
Dansville and Rochester. But the old order had changed, and a day had
come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the
surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the
wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat. Only thirty years ago--yet
to-day Nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the
hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it, and the turfy burial mound
of some Hengist and Horsa could not be more silent.

This old fosse seemed to strike the somewhat forgotten, out-of-the-world
note of the surrounding country. Picturesque to the eye, with bounteous
green prospects and smooth, smiling hills, it was not, we were told, as
prosperous as it looked. For some vague reason, the tides of agricultural
prosperity had ebbed from that spacious sunlit vale. A handsome old
trapper, who sat at his house door smoking his pipe and looking across
the green flats, set down the cause to the passing of the canal. Ah, yes!
it was possible for him, thirty years ago, to make the trip to Rochester
and back by the canal, and bring home a good ten dollars; but now--well,
every one in the valley was poor, except the man whose beehives we had
seen on the hillside half-a-mile back. He had made no less than a
thousand dollars out of his honey this last season. He was an old
bachelor, too, like himself. There were no less than five bachelors in
the valley--five old men without a woman to look after them.

"--or bother them," the old chap added humorously, relighting his pipe.
Mrs. Mulligan, half a mile farther up the valley, was the only woman
thereabouts; and she, by the way, would give us some lunch. We could say
that he had sent us.

So we left the old trapper to his pipe and his memories, and went in
search of Mrs. Mulligan. Presently a poor little house high up on the
hillside caught our eye, and we made toward it. As we were nearing the