those most affected by them cannot be guaranteed, but at least they will put an end to the separate existence of the canal population. When this result has been compassed by the inexorable progress of education and knowledge, the gradual disappearance of the canal population, the class of hereditary bargees as we have known it, and as it still exists, may be expected to follow at no remote date, for it was based on the enforcement of the family principle, and on the devotion of a whole community, from its youngest to its eldest member, to its maintenance. As it is the tow-barge is something of an anachronism, but the withdrawal of the youthful recruits, whose up-bringing alone rendered it possible, will entail its inevitable extinction. The decay and break-up of the guild of tjalk owners will be hastened by the introduction of steam and electricity as means of locomotion. The canals will lose the bright-coloured barges which are to-day their most striking feature, and the population that has so long floated over their surface. Life will be duller and more monotonous. The canal population, so long distinct, will be merged in the rest of the community. The tug will displace the tow-rope. The pullers will be housed on land, mastering the three R's instead of learning to strain at the girth. But there is still a brief period left during which the canal population may be seen in its original primitive existence, devoted to the barge, which is the only home known to six or seven thousand families, and traversing the water roads of their country in unceasing and endless progression. There is nothing like it in any other country of Europe. Venice has its water routes, but the gondola is not a domicile. There was a canal population in England, but, like much else in our modern life, it has lost whatever picturesqueness it might once have claimed. For a true canal population, bright and happy, living the same life from father to son and generation to generation, we must go to Holland. There these inland navigators ply their vocation with only one ambition, and that to become the owner of a tjalk, and to rear thereon a family of towers. It is said that the life is one that requires the consumption of unlimited quantitics of 'schnapps,' and the humidity of the atmosphere is undoubted. But even free libations do not diminish the prosperity of the bargees. They are a thriving race, and it must also be noted to their credit that they are well behaved, and not given to quarrels. Collisions on the thickly-covered canals are rare; malicious collisions are unknown. The barges pass and repass without hindrance, the tow-ropes never get entangled, there is mutual forbearance, and the skill derived from long experience in slipping the ropes uncler the barges does the rest. The conditions under which the canal population exists and thrives are a survival of an older order of things. When they disappear another of the