For some vague reason, the tides of agricultural prosperity had ebbed from that spacious sunlit vale.

A handsome old trapper, who sat at his house door smoking his pipe and looking across the green flats, set down the cause to the passing of the canal.

Ah, yes! it was possible for him, thirty years ago, to make the trip to Rochester and back by the canal, and bring home a good ten dollars; but now--well, every one in the valley was poor, except the man whose beehives we had seen on the hillside half-a-mile back.

He had made no less than a thousand dollars out of his honey this last season.

He was an old bachelor, too, like himself.