iar because each one carries
a great sign bearing the word "WATER" painted upon it. To see such a
vessel all by itself upon a great expanse of salt water suggests
Coleridge's line in _The Ancient Mariner_,

"Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink."

If it were not for those water-bearers--serving the same purpose as the
camels laden with water-bags upon the desert of Sahara--there truly
would not be a drop to drink.

I fancy that what we call our "lighters" are the only descendants that
recall the old days of the Dutch on Manhattan Island. They are
sail-boats that are used to carry goods from or to vessels that do not
come to the wharves, but lie out in the open water. They are very
old-fashioned and foreign-looking, built almost solidly of heavy wood,
and of a shape very like a turtle and quite as clumsy. Each one carries
a short thick mast that looks as if it had been broken off, and a little
narrow sail, absurdly disproportioned to the vessel. Everything these
lighters carry is put upon their decks, and they are so slow and so hard
to steer and so strong that all other craft give them a wide berth. It
is only a fancy of mine, yet I never see one without thinking that this
style of boat surely descended to us from the Dutch.

A FREE ENTERTAINMENT IN THE SAHARA.

The learned Professor Ducardanoy, and his assistant, Bouchardy, had been
toiling along the desert's edge all day. They had hoped to reach the
Algerian settlement of Nouvelle Saar-Louis before night, but the sun was
getting near the blank western horizon of yellow sand, and the low
mountain upon which Nouvelle Saar-Louis was built, the last southern
foot-hill of the Atlas, was still some twenty miles away to the east.

"We shall have to camp here in the sand, and push on in the morning,"
said the learned Ducardanoy, who was, as all his contemporaries knew,
the most renowned living chiropodist.

"I fear we shall," said the assistant, Bouchardy, who was not, it must
be understood, an assistant in Ducardanoy's surgery, but merely an
unscientific fellow who managed the magic-lantern, ate wool, and
breathed fire, and did the other things which constituted the grand free
entertainment preceding Ducardanoy's evening lectures on the science of
chiropody, in the course of which he was accustomed to perform a few
gratuitous operations with Ducardanoy's Corn Cure to prove its efficacy.
"I fear we shall," said Bouchardy; "but what is that buildi