For a long time I trod the carpet-like towpath without meeting or overtaking any fellow-traveler. It was as if I had discovered some unknown and perfect route of my own. The mirror surface of the canal beside me pictured my movements far more perfectly than any cinema film, reproducing every slightest tint and color. Now and again I halted to stretch out on the grassy slope at the edge of the water, in the all-bathing sunshine. Snow-white cherry-trees were slowly, regretfully shedding their blossoms, flecking the ground and here and there the edge of the canal with their cast-off petals. Bright-pink apple-trees, just coming into full bloom, were humming with myriad bees. A few birds sang gaily, yet a bit drowsily, falling wholly silent now and then, as if awed by nature’s loveliness. A weather-browned woman, her head covered with a clean white kerchief with strands of apple-blossom pink in it, knelt at the edge of the waterway a bit farther on, cutting the long grass with a little curved sickle, her every motion, too, caught by the mirroring canal. Along the highway below tramped others of her species, bearing to town on their backs the green fodder similarly gathered, in long cone-shaped baskets or wrapped in a large cloth. One had heaped her basket high with bright-yellow mustard, splashing the whitish roadway as with a splotch of paint. Vehicles there were none, except the little handcarts drawn by barefoot women or children, and now and then a man sometimes similarly unshod. Oxen reddish against green meadows or whitish against the red soil were standing idle, knee-deep in grass or slowly plowing the gently rolling fields. Farther off, clumps of cattle ranging from dark brown to faint yellow speckled the rounded hillocks. Fields white with daisies, yellow with buttercups, lilac with some other species of small flower, vied with one another in beautifying the more distant landscape. Still farther off, the world was mottled with clumps of forest, in which mingled the black evergreen of perennial foliage with the light green of new leaves. An owl or some member of his family hooted contentedly from the nearest woods. Modest little houses, with sharp, very-old-red roofs and whitewashed walls dulled by years of weather, stood in clusters of varying size on the sun-flooded hillsides. Nothing in the velvety, gentle scene, so different from the surly landscape of factory districts, suggested war, except now and again the red-banded caps of the men. The more wonder came upon me that these slow, simple country people with their never-failing greetings and their entire lack of warlike manner could have formed a part of the most militaristic nation in history. XIV “FOOD WEASELS”