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        The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,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, pecked about and put in between whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no song.

Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic.  Birds and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water!  Prose has seldom been adequate for such moments.  So, as my friend and I took up our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way: