seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and
impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is a real loss
of gracious ritual in our lives, and perhaps even more. Thus this simple
farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of
time. Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of
the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the
saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that
mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer
find any recognition in our daily routine: _Above all, worship thou the
gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings_.

Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our
memories. We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee,
our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and
water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills. On our left hand,
parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a
grass-grown causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the
surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown
gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations. So the
old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in
the lonelier country districts of England. We were curious as to the
meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that
remained of the old Genesee Canal. Thirty years ago, this moat had
brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between
Dansville and Rochester. But the old order had changed, and a day had
come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the
surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the
wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat. Only thirty years ago--yet
to-day Nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the
hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it, and the turfy burial mound