Diedrick's ditch;
there she sat knitting through the long sun, and the children brought
out her dinner. It was all up with Amos; he was too much of a gentleman
to fight a lady--that was the way he expressed it. She was a very large
lady, and a long-handled shovel is no mean weapon. The next year Judson
and Diedrick put in a modern water gauge and took the summer ebb in
equal inches. Some of the water-right difficulties are more squalid than
this, some more tragic; but unless you have known them you cannot very
well know what the water thinks as it slips past the gardens and in the
long slow sweeps of the canal. You get that sense of brooding from the
confined and sober floods, not all at once but by degrees, as one might
become aware of a middle-aged and serious neighbor who has had that in
his life to make him so. It is the repose of the completely accepted
instinct.

With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The
willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest
provocation. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the
dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the water beyond its appointed
bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the
willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they
will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation
of the willows that so little else finds growing-room along the large
canals. The birch beginning far back in the canon tangles is more
conservative; it is shy of man haunts and needs to have the permanence
of its drink assured. It stops far short of the summer limit of waters,
and I have never known it to take up a position on the banks beyond
the ploughed lands. There is something almost like premeditation in the
avoidance of cultivated tracts by certain plants of water borders. The
clematis, mingling its foliage secretly with its host, comes down with
the stream tangles to the village fences, skips over to corners of
little used pasture lands and the plantations that spring up about
waste water pools; but never ventures a footing in the trail of spade or
plough; will not be persuaded to grow in any garden plot. On the other
hand, the horehound, the common European species imported with the
colonies, hankers after hedgerows and snug little borders. It is more
widely distributed than many native species, and may be always found
along the ditches in the village corners, whe