e our floating grain-elevators; and
a myriad sea-spiders transformed from our darting tug-boats, and great
groaning mother-gulls dragging large coveys of helpless babies in their
wake Those would be the tow-boats with their long trains of canal-boats.
Turtles he would see by the score--huge flat, almost round turtles--some
red, some white, some brown. Those would be the ferry-boats,-which
really do look just like great sea-turtles when you are looking down
upon their flat backs from a high place like the Brooklyn Bridge. Like
fearful black ocean sharks would be the Atlantic steamers--long and
thin--out of whose way every other moving thing flies when they
approach. Our huge and towering palace boats of the Sound would turn
into great white elephants, trumpeting as if they had all caught cold in
their long snouts. And we shall see that many another animal and
creature would easily appear to the troubled dreamer without greatly
altering the shapes of the queer craft that have grown out of nearly
three hundred years of needs and developments in the water-life around
New York.

[Illustration: THE CANALLERS ON THE EAST RIVER.]

I suppose that the reader has heard that almost every Chinaman in this
country comes from the water population near Canton. That must be a
wonderful phase of life, where so many hundreds of thousands of persons
are actually born upon the water, to live out their lives upon the
water, and to die upon the water. They form a river population housed in
boats that make up a city far more peculiar than Venice--a floating city
of stores and work-shops, boarding-houses, amusement places, saloons,
and all the rest. We have nothing of the sort around New York. The
nearest approach to that condition is to be seen in the large docks on
the East River near the Battery, and one at Communipaw on the New Jersey
shore, where the canal-boats collect with the boatmen and their wives
and children aboard them. There one sees by the kitchen smoke-stacks
above the cabin roofs, by the lines of drying linen on the decks, by
the sight of women sewing and knitting under cooling awnings, and by the
views of children and cats and dogs playing upon the boats--by all these
things one sees how truly the canal-boats are floating homes as well as
merchant vessels. At night the sounds of singing and fiddling--sometimes
the nasal notes of house organs--tell more of this strange water life.
Some of the cabins of these canal-boats are qu