“They passed Schenectady in the morning, with the canal once more astir with boats.  They went through the cut of the Young Engineer and the Wat Hoix Gap, with the Mohawk roaring through the heavy rapids on their right, and the White Horse tossing his mane of spray.

“Then over the long aqueduct and down the locks; early in the afternoon they floated out into the basin, and by six o’clock saw Albany rising on a hill to their right….”

Walter D. Edmonds wrote this passage in Rome Haul in 1929.  I recommend this masterfully done historic fiction about the life of a “canawler”.