Suddenly your steamer turns sharply toward the starboard, toward another of the sleepy little towns that you have been watching all the way down from Philadelphia--the man who knows and who stands beside you on the deck will tell you that it is Delaware City--and right there under a little clump of trees is the beginning of the canal. You can see it plainly, with its entrance lock and guarding light, and if the day be Sunday or some holiday the townfolk will be down under the trees watching the steamer enter the lock. It is not much of a lock--scarcely eleven inches of raise at the flow of the tide--but it serves to protect the languid stretch of canal that reaches a long way inland. This gateway is a busy one at all times, for the Chesapeake and Delaware is one of the few old-time canals that has retained its prestige and its traffic. An immense freight tonnage passes through it in addition to the day-boats and the night-boats between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Moreover, the motor boats are already finding it of great service as an important link in the inside water-route that stretches north and south for a considerable distance along the Atlantic coast. [Illustration: In Baltimore Harbor] Engines go at quarter-speed through the thirteen miles of the canal and the man who prefers to take his travel fast has no place upon the boat. Four miles an hour is its official speed limit and even then the "wash" of larger craft is frequently destructive to the banks. But what of that speed limit with a good magazine in your hands and a slowly changing vista of open country ever spread before your hungry eyes? You approach swing-bridges with distinction, they slowly unfold at the sharp order of the boat's whistle, holding back ancient nags of little Delaware, drawing mud-covered buggies; heavy Conestoga wagons filled with farm produce for the towns and cities to the north; sometimes a big automobile snorting and puffing as if in rage at a few minutes of enforced delay. On the long stretches between the bridges the canal twists and turns as if finding its way, railroad fashion, between increasing slight elevations. Sometimes it is very wide and the tow-path side--for sailing-craft are often drawn by mules through it--is a slender embankment reaching across a broad expanse of water. You meet whole flotillas of freighters all the way and when edging your way past them you throw your Philadelphia morning paper into their wheel-houses you win real thanks. All the way the country changes its variety--and does not lose its fascination.