ite attractive. They show
dainty white lace curtains in the tiny square windows, carpets on the
floors, boxes of flowers upon the cabin roofs, and cleanly, neatly clad
mothers and little children. This is not the rule, however, and we see
enough, whenever we visit the canallers, to show that there is at least
some reason for their being generally regarded as a rude and rough
class.

Yet, apart from these canallers, we have enough persons who live on
the water to form what would be called a city out West. They are
mainly men who sleep in bunks and eat in the cabins of tug-boats,
steam passenger boats, freighters, and the like. A few women are among
them--stewardesses of passenger boats and the wives of the captains of
the other sorts of vessels. Of course I do not include here the men on
the ships that sail the ocean. Their homes are really at sea. I only
refer to the scores of thousands of persons who live upon boats that may
be called the horses of the harbor, because they tie up regularly every
night at certain piers, and every morning are sent to work, here and
there, at this place or that, to carry goods or passengers, or to haul
other boats. It is doubtful whether many children are born in these
shifting homes, but there is no doubt that very many girls and boys
sleep upon them, and are sent from them to the city's schools, and,
later, to the factories and shops to earn their living.

Of all the uncommon forms that boats take, the newest, instead of being
strange and complicated like most nineteenth-century inventions, are
almost as simple as anything that floats. Only rafts of logs are more
simple than what we call our "car-floats." They are the newest type of
boats we know, and have come into being because New York city is on an
island, with only a few railroads crossing to it from the mainland. The
other great and little railways, which bring and take goods and people
to and from New York, all stop on the opposite shores of our harbor, in
New Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island. Since the cars of one
railroad often have to go past the city upon the other roads, these
"floats" are used to transport them around our island, so that goods
from Boston or Sag Harbor, for instance, can be sent around New York to
the tracks of the roads that will carry them to San Francisco without
unloading or reloading. The floats that carry these cars are merely
boxes, the shape of great dominoes, with railroad tracks laid upon t