I became known to many who traveled the canal as being engaged in some mysterious quest.

I suppose I had an anxious and rather strange expression as I made my inquiries.
It took me two years to make up my mind to change to a passenger boat, so slow was I to alter my way of doing things.

I have always been that way.

My wife read _Knickerbocker's History of New York_ after the children were grown up and she had more time for reading, and always told the children that she was positive their father must be descended from that ancient Dutchman[4] who took thirteen months to look the ground over before he began to put up that well-known church in Rotterdam of which he was the builder.

After smoking over it to the tune of three hundred pounds of Virginia tobacco, after knocking his head--to jar his ideas loose, maybe--and breaking his pipe against every church in Holland and parts of France and Germany; after looking at the site of his church from every point of view--from land, from water, and from the air which he went up into by climbing other towers; this good old Dutch contractor and builder pulled off his coat and five pairs of breeches, and laid the corner-stone of the church.