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 of some Hengist and Horsa could not be more silent.
This old fosse seemed to strike the somewhat forgotten, out-of-the-world note of the surrounding country.

Picturesque to the eye, with bounteous green prospects and smooth, smiling hills, it was not, we were told, as prosperous as it looked.