age of wary survivors of that spring _battue_.

It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not
expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and
its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to
record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple,
elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be
somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations,
above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is
Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb
silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke
hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the
hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy
accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we
call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of
sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and
distant purple hills--all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty
laughter of a summer day--that we were glad enough to let the birds do
such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard
or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal.

As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from
out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing
sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy
black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full,
saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the
sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush--sadder and stranger than any
nightingale--played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old
water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of
silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I
wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt
Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death
of Lincoln:

Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings to himself a song.

But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse,
two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life
was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like
the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow,