Their Wedding Journey.....................................................................................................................................1

William Dean Howells .............................................................................................................................1

Their Wedding Journey.....................................................................................................................................2

William Dean Howells .............................................................................................................................2

I. THE OUTSET.....................................................................................................................................2

II. MIDSUMMERDAY'S DREAM....................................................................................................12

III. THE NIGHT BOAT........................................................................................................................17

IV. A DAY'S RAILROADING.............................................................................................................25

V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. ..................................................................................29

VI. NIAGARA. ......................................................................................................................................36

AVERY. .............................................................................................................................................................43

I.............................................................................................................................................................43

II. ...........................................................................................................................................................43

III. ..........................................................................................................................................................43

IV..........................................................................................................................................................44

IX. QUEBEC.........................................................................................................................................70

X. HOMEWARD AND HOME............................................................................................................85

They first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where they afterwards saw each other; whither,

indeed, he followed her; and there the match was also broken off. Why it was broken off, and why it was

renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long lovestory, which I do not think myself qualified to

rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a sustained or involved narration; though I am persuaded that a skillful

romancer could turn the courtship of Basil. and Isabel March to excellent account. Fortunately for me,

however, in attempting to tell the reader of the weddingjourney of a newly married couple, no longer very

young, to be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall have nothing to do but to talk of some

ordinary traits of American life as these appeared to them, to speak a little of wellknown and easily

accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of character.

They had agreed to make their weddingjourney in the simplest and quietest way, and as it did not take place

at once after their marriage, but some weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy from the outset.

"How much better," said Isabel, "to go now, when nobody cares whether you go or stay, than to have started

off upon a wretched weddingbreakfast, all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting to see you aboard

the cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of honeymoonshine about us; we shall go just like anybody

else,with a difference, dear, with a difference!" and she took Basil's cheeks between her hands. In order to

do this, she had to ran round the table; for they were at dinner, and Isabel's aunt, with whom they had begun

married life, sat substantial between them. It was rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added, with a

conscious blush, "We are past our first youth, you know; and we shall not strike the public as bridal, shall

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to be taken for a bride; and for my part I do

not object to a woman's being of Isabel's age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have been very

unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite

as fair as when they met first, eight years before; but he could not help recurring with an inextinguishable

regret to the long interval of their broken engagement, which but for that fatality they might have spent

together, he imagined, in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted him, more or less; it was part of

"I don't know," he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can whose cheeks are clasped between a

lady's hands, "you don't begin very well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this way,

they will put us into the 'bridal chambers' at all the hotels. And the carsthey're beginning to have them on

"Wasn't that thunder, Isabel?" asked her aunt, who had been contentedly surveying the tender spectacle

before her. "O dear! you'll never be able to go by the boat tonight, if it storms. It 's actually raining now!"

In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible storm of June, 1870. All in a moment, out of the hot sunshine of

the day it burst upon us before we quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the clouds,

and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible violence. In the square upon which our friends

looked out of their diningroom windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in the driving floods

of the rainfall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent themselves in desperate submission, and then with

a great shudder rent away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail mingled with the rain,

and now the few umbrellas that had braved the storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the

pavement, where the lightning played like flames burning from the earth, while the thunder roared overhead

without ceasing. There was something splendidly theatrical about it all; and when a streetcar, laden to the

last inch of its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under the stinging blows of the

hailstones, our friends felt as if it were an effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their

admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent reality in the affair, and at intervals

during the storm they debated about going at all that day, and decided to go and not to go, according to the

changing complexion of the elements. Basil had said that as this was their first journey together in America,

he wished to give it at the beginning as pungent a national character as possible, and that as he could imagine

nothing more peculiarly American than a voyage to New York by a Fall River boat, they ought to take that

route thither. So much upholstery, so much music, such variety cf company, he understood, could not be got

in any other way, and it might be that they would even catch a glimpse of the inventor of the combination,

who represented the very excess and extremity of a certain kind of Americanism. Isabel had eagerly

consented; but these aesthetic motives were paralyzed for her by the thought of passing Point Judith in a

storm, and she descended from her high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence and the

orchestra, and then to the idea of going by land in a sleepingcar. Having comfortably accomplished this feat,

she treated Basil's consent as a matter of course, not because she did not regard him, but because as a woman

she could not conceive of the steps to her conclusion as unknown to him, and always treated her own

decisions as the product of their common reasoning. But her husband held out for the boat, and insisted that if

the storm fell before seven o'clock, they could reach it at Newport by the last express; and it was this

obstinacy that, in proof of Isabel's wisdom, obliged them to wait two hours in the station before going by the

land route. The storm abated at five o'clock, and though the rain continued, it seemed well by a quarter of

seven to set out for the Old Colony Depot, in sight of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning caused

Isabel to seize her husband's arm, and to implore him, "O don't go by the boat!" On this, Basil had the

incredible weakness to yield; and bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot. It was the first swerving

from the ideal in their wedding journey, but it was by no means the last; though it must be confessed that it

They both felt more tranquil when they were irretrievably committed by the purchase of their tickets, and

when they sat down in the waiting. room of the station, with all the time between seven and nine o'clock

before them. Basil would have eked out the business of checking the trunks into an affair of some length, but

the baggagemaster did his duty with pitiless celerity; and so Basil, in the mere excess of his disoccupation,

bought an accidentinsurance ticket. This employed him half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal

contest, and went and took his place beside Isabel, who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl, perfectly content.

"Isn't it charming," she said gayly, "having to wait so long? It puts me in mind of some of those other

journeys we took together. But I can't think of those times with any patience, when we might really have had

each other, and didn't! Do you remember how long we had to wait at Chambery? and the numbers of military

gentlemen that waited too, with their little waists, and their kisses when they met? and that poor married

military gentleman, with the plain wife and the two children, and a tarnished uniform? He seemed to be

somehow in misfortune, and his mustache hung down in such a spiritless way, while all the other military

mustaches about curled and bristled with so much boldness. I think 'salles d'attente' everywhere are

delightful, and there is such a community of interest in them all, that when I come here only to go out to

Brookline, I feel myself a traveller once more,a blessed stranger in a strange land. O dear, Basil, those

were happy times after all, when we might have had each other and didn't! And now we're the more precious

She drew closer and closer to him, and looked at him in a way that threatened betrayal of her bridal character.

"Never!" she answered fiercely, recovering her distance with a start. "But, dearest, if you do see me going

"I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop. Besides, I didn't undertake to preserve the incognito of this bridal

If any accident of the sort dreaded had really happened, it would not have mattered so much, for as yet they

were the sole occupants of the waiting room. To be sure, the ticketseller was there, and the lady who

checked packages left in her charge, but these must have seen so many endearments pass between

passengers,that a fleeting caress or so would scarcely have drawn their notice to our pair. Yet Isabel did

not so much even as put her hand into her husband's; and as Basil afterwards said, it was very good practice.

Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirrored in all that come near us, and our friends were fated to

meet frequent parodies of their happiness from first to last on this journey. The travesty began with the very

first people who entered the waitingroom after themselves, and who were a very young couple starting like

themselves upon a pleasure tour, which also was evidently one of the first tours of any kind that they had

made. It was of modest extent, and comprised going to New York and back;, but they talked of it with a

fluttered and joyful expectation as if it were a voyage to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque of their

happiness (but with a touch of tragedy) in that kind of young man who is called by the females of his class a

fellow, and two young women of that kind known to him as girls. He took a place between these, and

presently began a robust flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself, after a brief struggle, of her

parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with a sort of tender rudeness inconceivable vapidities, such as

you would expect from none but a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus courted became selfishly

unconscious of everything but her own joy, and made no attempt to bring the other girl within its warmth, but

left her to languish forgotten on the other side. The latter sometimes leaned forward, and tried to divert a little

of the flirtation to herself, but the flirters snubbed her with short answers, and presently she gave up and sat

still in the sad patience of uncourted women. In this attitude she became a burden to Isabel, who was glad

when the three took themselves away, and were succeeded by a very stylish couplefrom New York, she

knew as well as if they had given her their address on West 999th Street. The lady was not pretty, and she

was not, Isabel thought, dressed in the perfect taste of Boston; but she owned frankly to herself that the

NewYorkeress was stylish, undeniably effective. The gentleman bought a ticket for New York, and

"O dear, yes; I'm only too glad to get off without browbeating; though I must say that this officer looks

affable enough. Really," he added, as an acquaintance of the ticketseller came in and nodded to him and said

"Hot, today!" "this is very strange. I always felt as if these men had no private life, no friendships like the

rest of us. On duty they seem so like sovereigns, set apart from mankind, and above us all, that it's quite

At intervals of their talk and silence there came vivid flashes of lightning and quite heavy shocks of thunder,

very consoling to our friends, who took them as so many compliments to their prudence in not going by the

boat, and who had secret doubts of their wisdom whenever these acknowledgments were withheld. Isabel

went so far as to say that she hoped nothing would happen to the boat, but I think she would cheerfully have

learnt that the vessel had been obliged to put back to Newport, on account of the storm, or even that it had

People constantly came and went in the waitingroom, which was sometimes quite full, and again empty of

all but themselves. In the course of their observations they formed many cordial friendships and bitter

enmities upon the ground of personal appearance, or particulars of dress, with people whom they saw for half

a minute upon an average; and they took such a keen interest in every one, that it would be hard to say

whether they were more concerned in an old gentleman with vigorously upright irongray hair, who sat

fronting them, and reading all the evening papers, or a young man who hurled himself through the door,

bought a ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and then ran down a departing train before it got

out of the station: they loved the old gentleman for a certain stubborn benevolence of expression, and if they

had been friends of the young man and his family for generations and felt bound if any harm befell him to go

and break the news gently to his parents, their nerves could not have been more intimately wrought upon by

his hazardous behavior. Still, as they had their tickets for New York, and he was going out on a merely local

train,to Brookline, I believe, they could not, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling of contempt for his

They were already as completely cut off from local associations and sympathies as if they were a thousand

miles and many months away from Boston. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gasjets as a gust of wind

drew through the station; they shared the gloom and isolation of a man who took a seat in the darkest corner

of the room, and sat there with folded arms, the genius of absence. In the patronizing spirit of travellers in a

foreign country they noted and approved the vases of cut flowers in the booth of the lady who checked

packages, and the pots of ivy in her windows. "These poor Bostonians," they said; "have some love of the

But after all was said and thought, it was only eight o'clock, and they still had an hour to wait.

Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a subtile interpretation of his uneasiness, "I don't want anything to

eat, Basil, but I think I know the weaknesses of men; and you had better go and pass the next halfhour over

This was said 'con stizza', the least little suggestion of it; but Basil rose with shameful alacrity. "Darling, if it's

"I'll go," he exclaimed, "because it isn't bridal, and will help us to pass for old married people."

"No, no, Basil, be honest; fibbing isn't your forte: I wonder you went into the insurance business; you ought

to have been a lawyer. Go because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps, or think you may be so before

I suppose it is always a little shocking and grievous to a wife when she recognizes a rival in butchers'meat

and the vegetables of the season. With her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery and her dainty habits

of lunching, she cannot reconcile with the idea (of) her husband's capacity for breakfasting, dining, supping,

and hot meals at all hours of the day and nightas they write it on the signboards of barbaric

eatinghouses. But isabel would have only herself to blame if she had not perceived this trait of Basil's before

marriage. She recurred now, as his figure disappeared down the station, to memorable instances of his

appetite in their European travels during their first engagement. "Yes, he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too

full of the notion of getting into Italy to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I thought I must

break with him on account of the wildboar; and at Heidelberg, the sausage and the ham! how could he, in

my presence? But I took him with all his faults, and was glad to get him," she added, ending her

meditation with a little burst of candor; and she did not even think of Basil's appetite when he reappeared.

With the thronging of many sorts of people, in parties and singly, into the waiting room, they became once

again mere observers of their kind, more or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so that individual

traits were merged in the character of multitude. Even then, they could catch glimpses of faces so sweet or

fine that they made themselves felt like moments of repose in the tumult, and here and there was something

so grotesque in dress of manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The ticketseller's stamp clicked

incessantly as he sold tickets to all points South and West: to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston; to New

Orleans, Chicago, Omaha; to St. Paul, Duluth, St. Louis; and it would not have been hard to find in that

anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness, an image of the whole busy affair of life. It was not a particularly

sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the

futureto which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every

imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to

In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last an old woman, so very infirm that she had to be upheld on

either hand by her husband and the hackman who had brought them, while a young girl went before with

shawls and pillows which she arranged upon the seat. There the invalid lay down, and turned towards the

crowd a white, suffering face, which was yet so heavenly meek and peaceful that it comforted whoever

In spirit our happy friends bowed themselves before it and owned that there was something better than

"O, I don't know, darling," she said; but she thought, "Perhaps it is like some blessed sorrow that takes us out

of this prison of a world, and sets us free of our everyday hates and desires, our aims, our fears. ourselves.

Maybe a long and mortal sickness might come to wear such a face in one of us two, and the other could see it,

She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whose face beamed a tender smile, as Isabel spoke to her. A

chord thrilled in two lives hitherto unknown to each other; but what was said Basil would not ask when the

invalid had taken Isabel's hand between her own, as for adieu, and she came back to his side with swimming

eyes. Perhaps his wife could have given no good reason for her emotion, if he had asked it. But it made her

very sweet and dear to him; and I suppose that when a tolerably unselfish man is once secure of a woman's

love, he is ordinarily more affected by her compassion and tenderness for other objects than by her feelings

towards himself. He likes well enough to think, "She loves me," but still better, "How kind and good she is!"

They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of getting places on the cars, and they never saw her again. The

man at the wicketgate leading to the train had thrown it up, and the people were pressing furiously through

as if their lives hung upon the chance of instant passage. Basil had secured his ticket for the sleepingcar, and

so he and Isabel stood aside and watched the tumult. When the rash was over they passed through, and as

they walked up and down the platform beside the train, "I was thinking," said Isabel, "after I spoke to that

poor old lady, of what Clara Williams says: that she wonders the happiest women in the world can look each

other in the face without bursting into tears, their happiness is so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged

about with misery. She declares that there's nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young mother, or a

little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her heart. She wonders they can live through it."

"Clara is very much of a reformer, and would make an end of all of us men, I suppose,except her father,

who supports her in the leisure that enables her to do her deep thinking. She little knows what we poor

fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours, and sob upon one another's necks.

"O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a blessed life. Perhaps it was that made

"Yes," said Basil, "it is almost a pity that religion is going out. But then you are to have the franchise."

This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy he might have been about to utter; and presently the train

carried them out into the gassprinkled darkness, with an evergrowing speed that soon left the city lamps far

behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure

of the nightexpress. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to

lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The draw bridges that gape upon the way, the

trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon

snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rock trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a

pitiless malice may have placed in your path,you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom

haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it

begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car,

and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it

is upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for

many heroic facts in the world. To the fantastic mood which possesses you equally, sleeping or waking, the

stoppages of the train have a weird character; and Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are

rather points in dreamland than wellknown towns of New England. As the train stops you drowse if you

have been waking, and wake if you have been in a doze; but in any case you are aware of the locomotive

hissing and coughing beyond the station, of flaring gasjets, of clattering feet of passengers getting on and

off; then of some one, conductor or stationmaster, walking the whole length of the train; and then you are

aware of an insane satisfaction in renewed flight through the darkness. You think hazily of the folk in their

beds in the town left behind, who stir uneasily at the sound of your train's departing whistle; and so all is a

By daylight Basil and Isabel found themselves at opposite ends of the car, struggling severally with the

problem of the morning's toilet. When the combat was ended, they were surprised at the decency of their

appearance, and Isabel said, "I think I'm presentable to an early Broadway public, and I've a fancy for not

going to a hotel. Lucy will be expecting us out there before noon; and we can pass the time pleasantly enough

She was a woman who loved any cheap defiance of custom, and she had an agreeable sense of adventure in

what she proposed. Besides, she felt that nothing could be more in the unconventional spirit in which they

meant to make their whole journey than a stroll about New York at half past six in the morning.

"Delightful!" answered Basil, who was always charmed with these small originalities. "You look well enough

for an evening party; and besides, you won't meet one of your own critical class on Broadway at this hour.

We will breakfast at one of those gilded metropolitan restaurants, and then go round to Leonard's, who will

be able to give us just three unhurried seconds. After that we'll push on out to his place."

At that early hour there were not many people astir on the wide avenue down which our friends strolled when

they left the station; but in the aspect of those they saw there was something that told of a greater heat than

they had yet known in Boston, and they were sensible of having reached a more southern latitude. The air,

though freshened by the over night's storm, still wanted the briskness and sparkle and pungency of the

Boston air, which is as delicious in summer as it is terrible in winter; and the faces that showed themselves

were sodden from the yesterday's heat and perspiration. A cornergrocer, seated in a sort of fierce

despondency upon a keg near his shop door, had lightly equipped himself for the struggle of the day in the

battered armor of the day before, and in a pair of roomy pantaloons, and a baggy shirt of neutral

tintperhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst the siege of the hot weather lasted,now

confronted the advancing sunlight, before which the long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring. A

marketing mother of a family paused at a provisionstore, and looking weakly in at the white aproned

butcher among his meats and flies, passes without an effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied shopgirls

tripped by in the draperies that betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby; from a

boardinghouse door issued briskly one of those cool young New Yorkers whom no circumstances can

oppress: breezycoated, whitelivened, clean, with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the

elbow of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning's news is snatched, whilst the person

sways lightly with the walk; in the street cars that slowly tinkled up and down were rows of people with

baskets between their legs and papers before their faces; and all showed by some peculiarity of air or dress

the excess of heat which they had already borne, and to which they seemed to look forward, and gave by the

scantiness of their number a vivid impression of the uncounted thousands within doors prolonging, before the

As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet deeper

"How lovely!" said Isabel, swiftly catching at her skirt, and deftly escaping contact with one of a long row of

ashbarrels posted sentinel like on the edge of the pavement. "Whose is it, Basil?"

"Ah! a poet's," answered her husband, "a man of whom we shall one day any of us be glad to say that we

liked him before he was famous. What a nebulous sweetness the first lines have, and what a clear, cool light

"You could have been as good a poet as that, Basil," said the ever personal and concretelyspeaking Isabel,

who could not look at a mountain without thinking what Basil might have done in that way, if he had tried.

"O no, I couldn't, dear. It's very difficult being any poet at all, though it's easy to be like one. But I've done

with it; I broke with the Muse the day you accepted me. She came into my office, looking so shabby,not

unlike one of those poor shopgirls; and as I was very well dressed from having just been to see you, why,

you know, I felt the difference. 'Well, my dear?' said I, not quite liking the look of reproach she was giving

me. 'You are groins to leave me,' she answered sadly. 'Well, yes; I suppose I must. You see the insurance

business is very absorbing; and besides, it has a bad appearance, your coming about so in office hours, and in

those clothes.' 'O,' she moaned out, 'you used to welcome me at all times, out in the country, and thought me

prettily dressed.' 'Yes, yes; but this is Boston; and Boston makes a great difference in one's ideas; and I'm

going to be married, too. Come, I don't want to seem ungrateful; we have had many pleasant times together, I

own it; and I've no objections to your being present at Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I

must draw the line there.' She gave me a look that made my heart ache, and went straight to my desk and took

out of a pigeon hole a lot of papers,odes upon your cruelty, Isabel; songs to you; sonnets,the sonnet, a

mighty poor one, I'd made the day before,and threw them all into the grate. Then she turned to me again,

signed adieu with mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the bottom wire of the poor thing's hoopskirt

clicking against each step of the stairway, as she went slowly and heavily down to the street." "O

don'tdon't, Basil," said his wife, "it seems like something wrong. I think you ought to have been ashamed."

"Ashamed ! I was heart broken. But it had to come to that. As I got hopeful about you, the Muse became a

sad bore; and more than once I found myself smiling at her when her back was turned. The Muse doesn't like

being laughed at any more than another woman would, and she would have left me shortly. No, I couldn't be

a poet like our MorningStreet friend. But see! the human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement with

They were frowzy servingmaids and silent; each swept down her own door steps and the pavement in front

of her own house, and then knocked her broom on the curbstone and vanished into the house, on which the

hand of change had already fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to the domestic gods, but had been

invaded at more than one point by the bustling deities of business in such streets the irregular, inspired

doctors and doctresses come first with inordinate doorplates, then a milliner filling the parlor window with

new bonnets; here even a publisher had hung his sign beside a door, through which the feet of young ladies

used to trip, and the feet of little children to patter. Here and there stood groups of dwellings unmolested as

yet outwardly; but even these had a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew themselves to be cheapish

boardinghouses or furnished lodgings for gentlemen, and were trying to hide it. To these belonged the

frowzy servingwomen; to these the rows of ashbarrels, in which the decrepit children and mothers of the

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some omnibuses beginning their long

day's travel up and down the handsome, tiresome length of that avenue; but for the most part it was empty.

There was, of course, a hurry of footpassengers upon the sidewalks, but these were sparse and

uncharacteristic, for New York proper was still fast asleep. The waiter at the restaurant into which our friends

stepped was so well aware of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of the city, that he could not forbear

a little patronage of them, which they did not resent. He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric

abundance, and charged for it with barbaric splendor. It is all but impossible not to wish to stand well with

your waiter: I have myself been often treated with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet I have never been

able to withhold the 'douceur' that marked me for a gentleman in their eyes, and entitled me to their

dishonorable esteem. Basil was not superior to this folly, and left the waster with the conviction that, if he

Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this man of the world continued his pilgrimage down Broadway,

which even in that desert state was full of a certain interest. Troops of laborers straggled along the pavements,

each with his dinnerpail in hand; and in many places the eternal building up and pulling down was already

going on; carts were struggling up the slopes of vast cellars, with loads of distracting rubbish; here stood the

halfdemolished walls of a house, with a sad variety of wall paper showing in the different rooms; there

clinked the trowel upon the brick, yonder the hammer on the stone; overhead swung and threatened the

marble block that the derrick was lifting to its place. As yet these forces of demolition and construction had

"Why, how shabby the street is!" said Isabel, at last. When I landed, after being abroad, I remember that

"Ah I but you were merely coming from Europe then; and now you arrive from Burton, and are contrasting

this poor Broadway with Washington Street. Don't be hard upon it, Isabel; every street can't be a Boston

street, you know," said Basil. Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great intensity both by birth and conviction,

believed her husband the only man able to have thoroughly baffled the malignity of the stars in causing him

to be born out of Boston; yet he sometimes trifled with his hardly achieved triumph, and even showed an

indifference to it, with an insincerity of which there can be no doubt whatever.

"O stuff!" she retorted, "as if I had any of that silly local pride! Though you know well enough that Boston is

the best place in the world. But Basil! I suppose Broadway strikes us as so fine, on coming ashore from

"Well, I don't know. Perhaps the street has some positive grandeur of its own, though it needs a multitude of

people in it to bring out its best effects. I'll allow its disheartening shabbiness and meanness in many ways;

but to stand in front of Grace Church, on a clear day,a day of late September, say,and look down the

swarming length of Broadway, on the movement and the numbers, while the Niagara roar swelled and

swelled from those human rapids, was always like strong new wine to me. I don't think the world affords

such another sight; and for one moment, at such times, I'd have been willing to be an Irish councilman, that I

might have some right to the pride I felt in the capital of the Irish Republic. What a fine thing it must be for

each victim of six centuries of oppression to reflect that he owns at least a dozen Americans, and that, with

Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel knew nothing about politics, and she felt that she was getting into

deep water; she answered buoyantly, but she was glad to make her weariness the occasion of hailing a stage,

and changing the conversation. The farther down town they went the busier the street grew; and about the

Astor House, where they alighted, there was already a bustle that nothing but a fire could have created at the

same hour in Boston. A little farther on the steeple of Trinity rose high into the scorching sunlight, while

below, in the shadow that was darker than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among their flowers.

"How still they lie!" mused the happy wife, peering through the iron fence in passing.

"Yes, their weddingjourneys are ended, poor things!" said Basil; and through both their minds flashed the

wonder if they should ever come to something like that; but it appeared so impossible that they both smiled at

"It's too early yet for Leonard," continued Basil; "what a pity the churchyard is locked up. We could spend

the time so delightfully in it. But, never mind; let us go down to the Battery,it 's not a very pleasant place,

but it's near, and it's historical, and it's open,where these drowsy friends of ours used to take the air when

they were in the fashion, and had some occasion for the element in its freshness. You can imagineit's

All places that fashion has once loved and abandoned are very melancholy; but of all such places, I think the

Battery is the most forlorn. Are there some sickly locusttrees there that cast a tremulous and decrepit shade

upon the mangy grassplots? I believe so, but I do not make sure; I am certain only of the mangy grassplots,

or rather the spaces between the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and opprobrious weed, a

stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morning

when our friends, with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, saw the ancient

promenade, a few scant and hungryeyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not

playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little

creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the castoff best drew of some happier child, a gay little

garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a

party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when

they had crawled out of their beds, to have put on only so much clothing as the law compelled. They

abandoned themselves upon the green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean hands clasped outside their

knees, sat and stared, silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible furnace, into which in

those days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the child which the younger woman had brought with

her feebly wailed unheeded at her side. On one side of these women were the shameless houses out of which

they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation; on the other side were

those houses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down the

boardinghouse scale through various unhomelike occupations to final dishonor and despair. Down nearer

the water, and not far from the castle that was once a playhouse and is now the depot of emigration, stood

certain expresswagons, and about these lounged a few hardlooking men. Beyond laughed and danced the

"Well," said Basil, "I think if I could choose, I should like to be a friendless German boy, setting foot for the

first time on this happy continent. Fancy his rapture on beholding this lovely spot, and these charming

American faces! What a smiling aspect life in the New World must wear to his young eyes, and how his heart

"Yes, Basil; it's all very pleasing, and thank yon for bringing me. But if you don't think of any other New

York delights to show me, do let us go and sit in Leonard's office till he comes, and then get out into the

Basil defended himself against the imputation that he had been trying to show New York to his wife, or that

he had any thought but of whiling away the long morning hours, until it should be time to go to Leonard. He

protested that a knowledge of Europe made New York the most uninteresting town in America, and that it

was the last place in the world where he should think of amusing himself or any one else; and then they both

upbraided the city's bigness and dullness with an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know. They

particularly derided the notion of New York's being loved by any one. It was immense, it was grand in some

ways, parts of it were exceedingly handsome; but it was too vast, too coarse, too restless. They could imagine

its being liked by a successful young man of business, or by a rich young girl, ignorant of life and with not

too nice a taste in her pleasures; but that it should be dear to any poet or scholar, or any woman of wisdom

and refinement, that they could not imagine. They could not think of any one's loving New York as Dante

loved Florence, or as Madame de Stael loved Paris, or as Johnson loved black, homely, homelike London.

And as they twittered their little dispraises, the giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and more

conscious of herself, waking from her night's sleep and becoming aware of her fleets and trains, and the

myriad hands and wheels that throughout the whole sea and land move for her, and do her will even while she

sleeps. All about the weddingjourneyers swelled the deep tide of life back from its nightlong ebb.

Broadway had filled her length with people; not yet the most characteristic New York crowd, but the not less

interesting multitude of strangers arrived by the early boats and trams, and that easily distinguishable class of

lately NewYorkized people from other places, about whom in the metropolis still hung the provincial

traditions of early rising; and over all, from moment to moment, the eager, audacious, welldressed, proper

life of the mighty city was beginning to prevail,though this was not so notable where Basil and Isabel had

paused at a certain window. It was the office of one of the English steamers, and he was saying, "It was by

this line I sailed, you know,"and she was interrupting him with, "When who could have dreamed that you

would ever be telling me of it here?" So the old marvel was wondered over anew, till it filled the world in

which there was room for nothing but the strangeness that they should have loved each other so long and not

made it known, that they should ever have uttered it, and that, being uttered, it should be so much more and

better than ever could have been dreamed. The broken engagement was a fable of disaster that only made

their present fortune more prosperous. The city ceased about them, and they walked on up the street, the first

man and first woman in the garden of the newmade earth. As they were both very conscious people, they

recognized in themselves some sense of this, and presently drolled it away, in the opulence of a time when

every moment brought some beautiful dream, and the soul could be prodigal of its bliss.

"I think if I had the naming of the animals over again, this morning, I shouldn't call snakes 'snakes'; should

"O no, Adam; we'd look out all the most graceful euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn't hurt the

They had waited to see Leonard, in order that they might learn better how to find his house in the country;

and now, when they came in upon him at nine o'clock, he welcomed them with all his friendly heart. He rose

from the pile of morning's letters to which he had but just sat down; he placed them the easiest chairs; he

made a feint of its not being a busy hour with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which was

still damp and odorous from the porter's broom, as a kind of downtown parlor; but after they had briefly

accounted to his amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had boasted of the original

fashion in which they had that morning seen New York, they took pity on him, and bade him adieu till

They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in

"Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, "that Leonard travels fifty miles every day by rail going to and from his

"Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at the South End, aren't there?" And in

agreement upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as well as all acquirable merits, with

after talk that need not be recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country station near which the

I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost of the reader, who suspects the

excitements which a long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and

they had not met since Isabel's return from Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this,

Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease all that she had said in blame of Basil's conduct during the

rupture, and exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit after their marriage. And

now that they had come together, their only talk; was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which

husbands could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard beheld in her

friend's joy the sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous

marriage of the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and comfort, they reassured one

another by every question and answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women

of our age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one

of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty, fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly

and benighted as their greatgrandmothers could have been in the same circumstances, and, as I say,

shamefully encouraged each other, in their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true.

"Do you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her oppressor, after having given him some elegant

extract from the last conversation upon husbands, "that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we

have been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they do

afterwards, and that people love each other better and better just because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss

does seem a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet"she put up both her palms

against his, and gave a vehement little push"there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the

"No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to the general public. But the application of it is that

you must be careful not to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we can be like the Leonards very

much sooner than they became so. The great object is not to have any hitchiness; and you know you ARE

They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil happiness by the example and precept of their

friends; and the time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards.

This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperous

New Yorkers who love both the excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite

the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in

every direction; and everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men like himself, whom

strict study of the timetable enables to spend all their working hours in the city and all their smoking and

The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their best looks for our bridal pair, and they were

charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it come to an end; yet

they all resigned themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other result than to detain the travellers

into the very heart of the hot weather. In that weather it was easy to do anything that did not require an active

effort, and resignation was so natural with the mercury at ninety, that I aan not sure but there was something

They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany by the day boat, which was represented to

them in every impossible phase. It would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it stopped the heat would be

insupportable. Besides it would bring them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the night there,

or push on to Niagara by the night train. "You had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till

you reach West Point, and you'll see all the best scenery. Then you can get a good night's rest, and start fresh

in the morning." So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have done if they had been

advised: "You had better go by the morning boat. It's deliciously cool, travelling; you see the whole of the

river, you reach Albany for supper, and you push through to Niagara that night and are done with it.

They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing

from the heat of the country into the heat of the city, where some affairs and pleasures were to employ them

Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat brooded upon them. All abroad burned the fierce

white light of the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but the very air withered, and

was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long journeys from

broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them

still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a

dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another; after every

station the desperate conductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket, which each passenger

seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could only

gasp out a cindery drop or two of icewater. The wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was

opened, the clatter of the rails struck through and through the car like a demoniac yell.

Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferryside, they seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from

fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so close and dead and mined with the carbonic breath of the locomotives was

the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an intensified

warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower, and in its coalsmoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat

In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer, before which every passenger, on going aboard the

ferryboat, paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends also

paused, and saw that the mercury was above ninety, and exulting with the pride that savages take in the cruel

On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool across their faces, and made them

forget the thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently they drew near that strange, irregular

row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York aide, and before the boat's

motion ceased the air grew thick and warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the

buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued, passing up through a gangway, on one side of which a

throng of return passengers was pent by a gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild animals. They were

streaming with perspiration, and, according to their different temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or

"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil when, free of the press, they lingered for a moment in the shade

outside, "whether we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage

there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route we

shall have sights end smells which the other can't offer us, but whichever we take we shall be sorry."

"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms, this weather."

They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well for them both if she could have exercised this

philosophy with regard to the whole day's business, or if she could have given up her plans for it, with the

same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small advance our

race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It

matters very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we feel the same bitter need of

pursuing it to the end. The mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one may call the

devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a

neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of

omission is all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Columbus, I should have thought

twice before setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have sternly

resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward,

and as soon as ever I came in sight of their granite perch should have turned back to England. But it is now

too late to repair these errors, and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdurate bridal pair,

in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horsecar, setting forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of

which had wiselier been left unaccomplished. Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth

Street, and then shop slowly down, icecreaming and staging and variously cooling and calming by the way,

until they reached the ticket office on Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to the

steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances

and conditions already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present halfday in New York should

It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed, but it was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle

which is by no means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,the spectacle of that great city

on a hot day, defiant of the elements, and prospering on with every form of labor, and at a terrible cost of life.

The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls that rankly grow and grow as from his life's blood, will only

lay down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze in upon heart and brain; the plethoric

millionaire for whom he toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk; the trembling beast

must stagger forward while the flamefaced tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on; in all those

vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase, packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying

down, arriving and departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and unsparing weariness of selling;

in the street, filled by the hurry and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.

Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a

kind of vision, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to have

dreamed of a long horsecar pilgrimage through that squalid street by the riverside, where presently they

came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with

processions of cars like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a foolish and useless breadth,

which made even the tall buildings (rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories) on either

hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust that the hot breaths of wind caught up and gent swirling into

the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition and construction of the city, and farther on of

vacant lots full of granite boulders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they had fellowpassengers,

whose sufferings made them odious and whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from the

car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselves in the shade of the crossstreet. A little

strip of shadow lay along the row of brownstone fronts, but there were intervals where the vacant lots cast

no shadow. With great bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these spaces as if they had

been difficult torrents or vast expanses of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a place,

and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before, moved on. They seemed now and then to stand at

doors, and to be told that people were out and again that they were in; and they had a sense of cool dark

parlors, and the airy rustling of lightmuslined ladies, of chat and of fans and icewater, and then they came

At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a purpose to go down town again, and of seeking the

nearest car by endless blocks of brownstone fronts, which with their eternal brownstone flights of steps, and

their handsome, intolerable uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying to pass a given

point and never getting by. Upon these streets there was, seldom a soul to be seen, so that when their ringing

at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with a vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand

they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting

pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his

mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the return

downtownwards they had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream; they had spoken of other hot days

that they had known elsewhere; and they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been so little

recognized. They said that the daily New York murder might even at that moment be somewhere taking

place; and that no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper circumstance; they morbidly

wondered what that day's murder would be, and in what swarming tenement house, or den of the assassin

streets by the riversides,if indeed it did not befall in some such high, closeshuttered, handsome dwelling

as those they passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the master and leave him

undiscovered and unmourned by the family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They

conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical

coast, and the grimy misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But now at

last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite distances

and long epochs asunder. They looked. hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it

was and from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey.

They bade each other a tacit farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the world.

When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to

Broadway. On this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and

sank by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size: there was no

flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the

reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the weddingjourneyers emerged upon Broadway, the

other passages and incidents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was

four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of

blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of lowhovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one

half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little

gusts of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets. In the upward

distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid

atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of

wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted Stages, with

quivering horses driven each by a man who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered with

a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heart for the crowding

passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the

footpassengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in

number than at any other time, though there were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul,

they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there they showed the effect of the

heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan

before his deathwhite flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a

somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side, "I can't stand this

much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart" But still the multitude hurried on,

passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shopdoors and emerging from them, dispersing

down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular

fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently

to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for

this,looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of

the madness of purpose, they cried with one voice, that it was a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from

It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they entered they heard

the next comer cry out with a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninetyseven degrees!"

Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at the shrine of heat;

before he tossed off the hissing draught that two pale, closeclipped boys served them from either side of the

fountain. Then in the order of their coming they issued through another door upon the side street, each, as he

disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance upon a little group near another counter.

The group was of a very patient, half frightened, halfpuzzled looking gentleman who sat perfectly still on a

stool, and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full of pounded ice, and

easing one hand with the other when the first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look upon this

group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life,

and as "The Sunstroke" would sell enormously in the hot season. "Better take a little more of that," the

apothecary said, looking up from his prescription, and, as the organized sympathy of the seemingly

indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted something in the glass he held.

"Do you still feel like fainting?" asked the humane authority. "Slightly, now and then," answered the other,

"but I'm hanging on hard to the bottom curve of that icicled S on your sodafountain, and I feel that I'm all

right as long as I can see that. The people get rather hazy, occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But

I don't know that I look very impressive myself," he added in the jesting mood which seems the natural

"O, you'll do!" the apothecary answered, with a laugh; but he said, in answer to an anxious question from the

lady, "He mustn't be moved for an hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed her

office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isabel offered her the

commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they could do nothing, she and

Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door. "What a shocking thing!" she

whispered. "Did you see how all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and

evidently forgot them the next instant? It was dreadful. I shouldn't like to have you sunstruck in New York."

"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident must happen to me among strangers, I

think I should prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest

place. Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be sure to be. As

for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give me

the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke. There is such experience of calamity there that you could

hardly fall the first victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothecary's was merely

exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands every

blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd may be a little 'ennuye' of sun strokes, and to that

degree indifferent, but they most likely know that they can only do harm by an expression of sympathy, and

so they delegate their pity as they have delegated their helpfulness to the proper authority, and go about their

business. If a man was overcome in the middle of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't

know what to do, and the tenderhearted people would crowd about so that no breath of air could reach the

"May be so, dear," said the wife, pensively; but if anything did happen to you in New York, I should like to

have the spectators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps I'm a little exacting."

"I think you are. Nothing is so hard as to understand that there are human beings in this world besides one's

self and one's set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and I there in the apothecary's shop, as it

might very well be; and let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible midsummerday's

dream. We must have a carriage," he added with tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, "as we ought to have

had all day; though I'm not sorry, now the worst's over, to have seen the worst."

There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of

tea really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. Therefore I do not think it trivial or untrue

to say that there is for the moment nothing more satisfactory in life than to have bought your ticket on the

night boat up the Hudson and secured your stateroom key an hour or two before departure, and some time

even before the pressure at the clerk's office has begun. In the transaction with this castellated baron, you

have of course been treated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your selfrespect swells with a sense

of having escaped positive insult; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket against its guttapercha number,

and you walk up and down the gorgeously carpeted, singlecolumned, twostory cabin, amid a multitude of

plush sofas and chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the

aristocratic gloom of the yellow waiters. Your own stateroom as you enter it from time to time is an

evernew surprise of splendors, a magnificent effect of amplitude, of mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains,

and of marble topped washstand. In the mere wantonness of an unalloyed prosperity you say to the saffron

nobleman nearest your door, "Bring me a pitcher of icewater, quick, please!" and you do not find the

If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much pleasure from these things, then imagine the infinite comfort of

our weddingjourneyers, transported from Broadway on that pitiless afternoon to the shelter and the quiet of

that absurdly palatial steamboat. It was not yet crowded, and by the riverside there was almost a freshness in

the air. They disposed of their troubling bags and packages; they complimented the ridiculous princeliness of

their stateroom, and then they betook themselves to the sheltered space aft of the saloon, where they sat down

for the tranquiller observance of the wharf and whatever should come to be seen by them. Like all people

who have just escaped with their lives from some menacing calamity, they were very philosophical in spirit;

and having got aboard of their own motion, and being neither of them apparently the worse for the ordeal

"What an amusingly superb affair!" Basil cried as they glanced through an open window down the long vista

of the saloon. "Good heavens! Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain republicans to Albany in comfort and

safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise? Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter," he

added. "I am spoilt for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and a humble

threestory swellfront up at the South End is no longer the place for me. Dearest,

never to leave this Aladdin'spalacelike steamboat, but spend our lives in perpetual trips up and down the

To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly sketched the life they could lead

aboard. Since they could not help it, they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval between

disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our democratic 'menage' to the taste of the richest

and most extravagant plebeian amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he minds

money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecile who will have lace

curtains to the steamboat berth into which he gets with his pantaloons on, and out of which he may be blown

by an exploding boiler at any moment; it is he who will have for supper that overgrown and shapeless dinner

in the lower saloon, and will not let any one else buy tea or toast for a less sum than he pays for his surfeit; it

is he who perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and the reluctance of the waiters; it is he, in fact, who now

comes out of the saloon, with his womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel sit.

Personally, he is not so bad; he is goodlooking, like all of us; he is better dressed than most of us; he

behaves himself quietly, if not easily; and no lord so loathes a scene. Next year he is going to Europe, where

he will not show to so much advantage as here; but for the present it would be hard to say in what way he is

It was something besides the river that made the air so much more sufferable than it had been. Over the city,

since our friends had come aboard the boat, a black cloud had gathered and now hung low upon it, while the

wind from the face of the water took the dust in the neighboring streets, and frolicked it about the

housetops, and in the faces of the arriving passengers, who, as the moment of departure drew near, appeared

in constantly increasing numbers and in greater variety, with not only the trepidation of going upon them, but

The breast of the black cloud was now zigzagged from moment to moment by lightning, and claps of

deafening thunder broke from it. At last the long endurance of the day was spent, and out of its convulsion

burst floods of rain, again and again sweeping the promenadedeck where the people sat, and driving them

disconsolate into the saloon. The air was darkened as by night, and with many regrets for the vanishing

prospect, mingled with a sense of relief from the heat, our friends felt the boat tremble away from her

"Ah! if we had only taken the day boat!" moaned Isabel. "Now, we shall see nothing of the river landscape,

and we shall never be able to put ourselves down when we long for Europe, by declaring that the scenery of

Yet they resolved, this indomitably goodnatured couple, that they would be just even to the elements, which

had by no means been generous to them; and they owned that if so noble a storm had celebrated their

departure upon some storied river from some more romantic port than New York, they would have thought it

an admirable thing. Even whilst they contented themselves, the storm passed, and left a veiled and humid sky

overhead, that gave a charming softness to the scene on which their eyes fell when they came out of the

saloon again, and took their places with a largely increased companionship on the deck.

They had already reached that part of the river where the uplands begin, and their course was between stately

walls of rocky steepness, or wooded slopes, or grassy hollows, the scene forever losing and taking grand and

lovely shape. Wreaths of mist hung about the tops of the loftier headlands, and long shadows draped their

sides. As the night grew, lights twinkled from a lonely house here and there in the valleys; a swarm of lamps

showed a town where it lay upon the lap or at the foot of the hills. Behind them stretched the great gray river,

haunted with many sails; now a group of canalboats grappled together, and having an air of coziness in their

adventure upon this strange current out of their own sluggish waters, drifted out of sight; and now a smaller

and slower steamer, making a laborious show of keeping up was passed, and reluctantly fell behind; along the

water's edge rattled and hooted the frequent trains. They could not tell at any time what part of the river they

were on, and they could not, if they would, have made its beauty a matter of conscientious observation; but

all the more, therefore, they deeply enjoyed it without reference to time or place. They felt some natural pain

when they thought that they might unwittingly pass the scenes that Irving has made part of the common

dreamland, and they would fair have seen the lighted windows of the house out of which a cheerful ray has

penetrated to so many hearts; but being sure of nothing, as they were, they had the comfort of finding the

Tappan Zee in every expanse of the river, and of discovering SunnySide on every pleasant slope. By virtue

of this helplessness, the Hudson, without ceasing to be the Hudson, became from moment to moment all fair

and stately streams upon which they had voyaged or read of voyaging, from the Nile to the Mississippi. There

is no other travel like river travel; it is the perfection of movement, and one might well desire never to arrive

at one's destination. The abundance of room, the free, pure air, the constant delight of the eyes in the

changing landscape, the soft tremor of the boat, so steady upon her keel, the variety of the little world on

board,all form a charm which no good heart in a sound body can resist. So, whilst the twilight held, well

content, in contiguous chairs, they purred in flattery of their kindly fate, imagining different pleasures,

certainly, but none greater, and tasting to its subtlest flavor the happiness conscious of itself.

Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so interesting to them in this objective light, that they had little desire to

turn from its contemplation to the people around them; and when at last they did so, it was still with lingering

glances of selfrecognition and enjoyment. They divined rightly that one of the main conditions of their

present felicity was the fact that they had seen so much of time and of the world, that they had no longer any

desire to take beholding eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure, and they understood that their

prosperous love accounted as much as years and travel for this result. If they had had a loftier opinion of

themselves, their indifference to others might have made them offensive; but with their modest estimate of

their own value in the world, they could have all the comfort of selfsufficiency, without its vulgarity.

"O yes!" said Basil, in answer to some apostrophe to their bliss from Isabel, "it's the greatest imaginable

satisfaction to have lived past certain things. I always knew that I was not a very handsome or otherwise

captivating person, but I can remember yearsnow blessedly remotewhen I never could see a young girl

without hoping she would mistake me for something of that sort. I couldn't help desiring that some

fascination of mine, which had escaped my own analysis, would have an effect upon her. I dare say all young

men are so. I used to live for the possible interest I might inspire in your sex, Isabel. They controlled my

movements, my attitudes; they forbade me repose; and yet I believe I was no ass, but a tolerably sensible

fellow. Blessed be marriage, I am free at last! All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest,and it 's

mighty little,is mere pageant to me; and I thank Heaven that I can meet the most stylish girl now upon the

broad level of our common humanity. Besides, it seems to me that our experience of life has quieted us in

many other ways. What a luxury it is to sit here, and reflect that we do not want any of these people to

suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful, or well dressed, and do not care to show off in any sort of way

This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just sense of their contrast to the group of people nearest

there,a young man of the second or third qualityand two young girls. The eldest of these was carrying

on a vivacious flirtation with the young man, who was apparently an acquaintance of brief standing; the other

was scarcely more than a child, and sat somewhat abashed at the sparkle of the colloquy. They were

conjecturally sisters going home from some visit, and not skilled in the world, but of a certain repute in their

country neighborhood for beauty and wit. The young man presently gave himself out as one who, in pursuit

of trade for the drygoods house he represented, had travelled many thousands of miles in all parts of the

country. The encounter was visibly that kind of adventure which both would treasure up for future celebration

to their different friends; and it had a brilliancy and interest which they could not even now consent to keep to

themselves. They talked to each other and at all the company within hearing, and exchanged curt speeches

Young Woman (bridling, and twitching her head from side to side, in the high excitement of the dialogue).

Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don't believe me, you ask your mother when you get home.

Young Woman. Yes, you've told the truth for once, for a wonder. I'm able to take care of myself,perfectly.

Giggles and horror from the younger sister, sensation in the young man, and so much rapture in the young

woman that she drops the key of her stateroom from her hand. They both stoop, and a jocose scuffle for it

ensues, after which the talk takes an autobiographical turn on the part of the young man, and drops into an

unintelligible murmur. Ah! poor Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in thy

Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one young and the other old, talking of some business out of which

the latter had retired. The younger had been asked his opinion upon some point, and he was expanding with a

flattered consciousness of the elder's perception of his importance, and toadying to him with the pleasure

which all young men feel in winning the favor of seniors in their vocation. "Well, as I was asay'n', Isaac

don't seem to haf no natcheral pent for the glothing business. Man gomes in and wands a goat,"he seemed

to be speaking of a garment and not a domestic animal,"Isaac'll zell him the goat he wands him to puy, and

he'll make him believe it 'a the goat he was a lookin' for. Well, now, that's well enough as far as it goes; but

you know and I know, Mr. Rosenthal, that that 's no way to do business. A man gan't zugzeed that goes upon

that brincible. Id's wrong. Id's easy enough to make a man puy the goat you want him to, if he wands a goat,

but the thing is to make him puy the goat that you wand to zell when he don't wand no goat at all. You've

asked me what I thought and I've dold you. Isaac'll never zugzeed in the redail glothingbusiness in the

"Well," sighed the elder, who filled his armchair quite full, and quivered with a comfortable jellylike tremor

in it, at every pulsation of the engine, "I was afraid of something of the kind. As you say, Benjamin, he don't

seem to have no pent for it. And yet I proughd him up to the business; I drained him to it, myself."

Besides these talkers, there were scattered singly, or grouped about in twos and threes and fours, the various

people one encounters on a Hudson River boat, who are on the whole different from the passengers on other

rivers, though they all have features in common. There was that man of the sudden gains, who has already

been typified; and there was also the smoother rich man of inherited wealth, from whom you can somehow

know the former so readily. They were each attended by their several retinues of womankind, the daughters

all much alike, but the mothers somewhat different. They were going to Saratoga, where perhaps the

exigencies of fashion would bring them acquainted, and where the blue blood of a quarter of a century would

be kind to the yesterday's fluid of warmer hue. There was something pleasanter in the face of the hereditary

aristocrat, but not so strong, nor, altogether, so admirable; particularly if you reflected that he really

represented nothing in the world, no great culture, no political influence, no civic aspiration, not even a

pecuniary force, nothing but a social set, an alien clublife, a tradition of dining. We live in a true fairy land

after all, where the hoarded treasure turns to a heap of dry leaves. The almighty dollar defeats itself, and

finally buys nothing that a man cares to have. The very highest pleasure that such an American's money can

purchase is exile, and to this rich man doubtless Europe is a twicetold tale. Let us clap our empty pockets,

We can be as glad, apparently, and with the same reason as the poorly dressed young man standing near

beside the guard, whose face Basil and Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concerning whom, they

romanced that he was going home, wherever his home was, with the manuscript of a rejected book in his

pocket. They imagined him no great things of a poet, to be sure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feeling

for him, and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught flavors of Tennyson and

Browning in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morris: for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods

and heroes of the nineteenth century, that he was now carrying back from New York with him? Basil

sketched from the colors of his own longaccepted disappointments a moving little picture of this poor

imagined poet's adventures; with what kindness and unkindness he had been put to shame by publishers, and

how, descending from his high, hopes of a book, he had tried to sell to the magazines some of the shorter

pieces out of the "And other Poems" which were to have filled up the volume. "He's going back rather

stunned and bewildered; but it's something to have tasted the city, and its bitter may turn to sweet on his

palate, at last, till he finds himself longing for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow! one compassionate

cutthroat of a publisher even asked him to lunch, being struck, as we are, with something fine in his face. I

hope he's got somebody who believes in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more comfortable, for the present,

So the play of which they were both actors and spectators went on about them. Like all passages of life, it

seemed now a grotesque mystery, with a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent

tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed, of either were at work there, and this was

but one brief scene of the immense complex drama which was to proceed so variously in such different times

and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity. The contrasts were sharp: each group had its travesty

in some other; the talk of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next; but of all these parodies

none was so terribly effective as the two women, who sat in the midst of the company, yet were somehow

distinct from the rest. One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other was dressed in bridal white, and

they were both alike awful in their mockery of guiltless sorrow and guiltless joy. They were not old, but the

soul of youth was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruin ancient as sin looked from their eyes; their

talk and laughter seemed the echo of an innumerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land

and time, each solitary forever, yet all bound together in the unity of an imperishable slavery and shame.

What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters! Let us be glad the night drops her curtain upon the cheap

Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there were numbers of people lounging

about on the sofas, in various attitudes of talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were others reading

"Lothair," a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very fashionable book indeed. There was

in the air that odor of paint and carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of the chandeliers ticked

softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a

A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot's bell signaling the engineer to slow the

boat. There was a moment of perfect silence; then all the drops of the chandeliers in the saloon clashed

musically together; then fell another silence; and at last came wild cries for help, strongly qualified with

blasphemies and curses. "Send out a boat!" "There was a woman aboard that steamboat!" "Lower your

boats!" "Run a craft right down, with your big boat!" "Send out a boat and pick up the crew! "The cries rose

and sank, and finally ceased; through the lattice of the stateroom window some lights shone faintly on the

"Wait here, Isabel!" said her husband. "We've run down a boat. We don't seem hurt; but I'll go see. I'll be

Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a world wildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it was the

fashion for ladies to wear their hair down their backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to speak to

each other without introduction. The place with which she had felt so familiar a little while before was now

utterly estranged. There was no motion of the boat, and in the momentary suspense a quiet prevailed, in

which those grotesque shapes of disarray crept noiselessly round whispering panicstricken conjectures.

There was no rushing to and fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there was not a man to be seen, for apparently

they had all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the calamity. A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it was

such a topsy turvy world that it would have seemed only another dreamland, but that it was marked for

reality by one signal fact. With the rest appeared the woman in bridal white and the woman in widow's black,

and there, amidst the fright that made all others friends, and for aught that most knew, in the presence of

Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had become known to Isabel and the rest that their own steamer had

suffered no harm, but that she had struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of canal boats, from which

those alarming cries and curses had come. The steamer was now lying by for the small boats she had sent out

"Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chandeliers," said one of the ladies. "Is it such a very alight matter

She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered lightly, "I don't think you ladies ought to have been disturbed

at all. In running over a common towboat on a perfectly clear night like this there should have been no noise

and no perceptible jar. They manage better on the Mississippi, and both boats often go down without waking

The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of humor, listened with undisguised displeasure to this speech. It

dispersed them, in fact; some turned away to bivouac for the rest of the night upon the armchairs and sofas,

while others returned to their rooms. With the latter went Isabel. "Lock me in, Basil," she said, with a bold

meekness, "and if anything more happens don't wake me till the last moment." It was hard to part from him,

but she felt that his vigil would somehow be useful to the boat, and she confidingly fell into a sleep that lasted

Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly devolved so great a responsibility, went forward to the

promenade in front of the saloon, in hopes of learning something more of the catastrophe from the people

A large part of the passengers were still there, seated or standing about in earnest colloquy. They were in that

mood which follows great excitement, and in which the feeblestminded are sure to lead the talk. At such

times one feels that a sensible frame of mind is unsympathetic, and if expressed, unpopular, or perhaps not

quite safe; and Basil, warned by his fate with the ladies, listened gravely to the voice of the common

The principal speaker was a tall person, wearing a silk travellingcap. He had a face of stupid benignity and a

selfsatisfied smirk; and he was formally trying to put at his ease, and hopelessly confusing the loutish youth

before him. "You say you saw the whole accident, and you're probably the only passenger that did see it.

You'll be the most important witness at the trial," he added, as if there would ever be any trial about it. "Now,

"Ah! bows on," repeated the other, with great satisfaction; and a little murmur of "Bows on!" ran round the

"That is," added the witness, "it seemed as if we struck her amidships, and cut her in two, and sunk her."

"Just so," continued the examiner, accepting the explanation, "bows on. Now I want to ask if you saw our

"That'll do," exclaimed the other. "This gentleman's experience coincides exactly with my own. I didn't see

the collision, but I did see the cloud of steam from the sinking boat, and I saw her go down. There wasn't an

officer to be found anywhere on board our boat. I looked about for the captain and the mate myself, and

"The officers ought all to have been sitting here on the promenade deck," suggested one ironical spirit in the

The gentleman in the silk travellingcap now took a chair, and a number of sympathetic listeners drew their

chairs about him, and then began an interchange of experience, in which each related to the last particular all

that he felt, thought, and said, and, if married, what his wife felt, thought, and said, at the moment of the

calamity. They turned the disaster over and over in their talk, and rolled it under their tongues. Then they

reverted to former accidents in which they had been concerned; and the silkcapped gentleman told, to the

common admiration, of a fearful escape of his, on the Erie Road, from being thrown down a steep

embankment fifty feet high by a piece of rock that had fallen on the track. "Now just see, gentlemen, what a

little thing, humanly speaking, life depends upon. If that old woman had been able to sleep, and hadn't sent

that boy down to warn the train, we should have run into the rock and been dashed to pieces. The passengers

"Well," said one of the group, a man in a hard hat, "I never lie down on a steamboat or a railroad train. I want

The others looked at this speaker with interest, as one who had invented a safe method of travel.

"I happened to be up tonight, but I almost always undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my own house,"

The champions of the rival systems debated their merits with suavity and mutual respect, but they met with

scornful silence a compromising spirit who held that it was better to throw off your coat and boots, but keep

your pantaloons on. Meanwhile, the steamer was hanging idle upon the current, against which it now and

then stirred a careless wheel, still waiting for the return of the small boats. Thin gray clouds, through rifts of

which a star sparkled keenly here and there, veiled the heavens; shadowy bluffs loomed up on either hand; in

a hollow on the left twinkled a drowsy little town; a beautiful stillness lay on all.

After an hour's interval a shout was heard from far down the river;. then later the plash of oars; then a cry

hailing the approaching boats, and the answer, "All safe!" Presently the boats had come alongside, and the

passengers crowded down to the guard to learn the details of the search. Basil heard a hollow, moaning,

gurgling sound, regular as that of the machinery, for some note of which he mistook it. "Clear the gangway

there!" shouted a gruff voice; "man scalded here!" And a burden was carried by from which fluttered, with its

Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the morning come.

The boat swiftly ascended the current, and presently the steeper shores were left behind and the banks fell

away in long upward sloping fields, with farmhouses and with stacks of harvest dimly visible in the

generous expanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawing his nets, and bending from his boat, there

near Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque immortal attitudes of Raphael's Galilean fisherman; and now a flush

mounted the pale face of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the dawn there came, more to the sight

than any other sense, a vague menace of heat. But as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil

bathed his weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion of the scalded man, and how he was

to fare that day. This poor wretch seemed of another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the

happy, and Basil's pity was quite an abstraction; which, again, amused and shocked him, and he asked his

heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little more earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien

creature here and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to the disaster of the night, and to realize

himself suddenly bereft of her who so filled his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security of sleep,

Death had passed them both so close that his presence might well have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg

that grazes the ship in the night freezes all the air about it. But it was quite idle: where love was, life only

was; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden that he would have laid upon them; his revery reflected

with delicious caprice the looks, the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore him far away from the sad

Happiness has commonly a good appetite; and the thought of the fortunately ended adventures of the night,

the fresh morning air, and the content of their own hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the boat reached

Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated with spirit the question of breakfast and the best

place of breakfasting in a city which neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy way.

They decided at last, in view of the early departure of the train, and the probability that they would be more

hurried at a hotel, to breakfast at the station, and thither they went and took places at one of the many tables

^w4hin, where they seemed to have been expected only by the flies. The waitress plainly had not looked for

them, and for a time found their presence so incredible that she would not acknowledge the rattling that Basil

was obliged to make on his glass. Then it appeared that the cook would not believe in them, and he did not

send them, till they were quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee,

the oily slices of fugacious potatoes slipping about in their shallow dish and skillfully evading pursuit, the

pieces of beef that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit, steaming evilly up into the face when opened, and

The weddingjourneyers looked at each other with eyes of sad amaze. They bowed themselves for a moment

to the viands, and then by an equal impulse refrained. They were sufficiently young, they were happy, they

were hungry; nature is great and strong, but art is greater, and before these triumphs of the cook at the Albany

depot appetite succumbed. By a terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor in their

cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the character and history of the materials of that breakfast.

Presently Isabel paused, played a little with her knife, and, after a moment. looked up at her husband with an

arch regard and said: "I was just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where our train

once stopped for breakfast. I remember the freshness and brightness of everything on the little tables,the

plates, the napkins, the gleaming halfbottles of wine. They seemed to have been preparing that breakfast for

us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly seated before they served us with great cups of

'caffeaulait', and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and

potatoes,such potatoes! Dear me, how little I ate of it! I wish, for once, I'd had your appetite, Basil; I do

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despite the tragical contrast her words had suggested, Basil

finally joined. So much amazement had probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted in that

place; but their lightness did not at all commend them. The waitress had not liked it from the first, and had

served them with reluctance; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon them as if he believed

them about to escape without payment. Here, then, they had enforced a great fact of travelling,that people

who serve the public are kindly and pleasant in proportion as they serve it well. The unjust and the inefficient

have always that consciousness of evil which will not let a man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact. There was already such heat from without, even

at eight o'clock in the morning, that they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly took their

places in the train, which had been made up for departure. They had deliberately rejected the notion of a

drawingroom car as affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of ordinary

American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite comfortable in the common passengercar,

and disposed to view the scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much

complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open window to make the heat tolerable, and the great

brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly

love for its mild beauty and tranquil picturesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I say they enjoyed

it. There are nowhere any considerable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows and the

wide meadows of a grazing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River rippling down through all, and at

frequent intervals the life of the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazy boats that seem not to stir, and

the horses that the train passes with a whirl, and, leaves slowly stepping forward and swiftly slipping

backward. There are farms that had once, or still have, the romance to them of being Dutch farms,if there

is any romance in that,and one conjectures a Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain. Spaces of

woodland here and there dapple the slopes, and the cozy red farmhouses repose by the side of their

capacious red barns. Truly, there is no ground on which to defend the idleness, and yet as the train strives

furiously onward amid these scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind it, and to

saunter at will up and down the landscape. I stop at the farmyard gates, and sit upon the porches or

thresholds, and am served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning's work

and have leisure to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies, with decent caps upon their gray hair,

then I do not complain if the drink is brought me by some redcheeked, comely young girl, out of

Washington Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes an

attitude of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I have done drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as

I lounge through the barnyard, if I find the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do not mind a

meadowlark's singing in the top of the elmtree beside the pump. In these excursions the watchdogs know

me for a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in the sun before the gate. At all

the places, I have the people keep bees, and, in the garden full of worthy potherbs, such idlers in the

vegetable world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and fouro'clocks, near a great bed in which the asparagus has

gone to sleep for the season with a dream of delicate spray hanging over it. I walk unmolested through the

farmer's tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of his voluble mowingmachine, and learn to my

heart's content that his name begins with Van, and that his family has owned that farm ever since the days of

the Patroon; which I dare say is not true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hayfield, and wake up on the

towpath of the canal beside that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only, because they

are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering underlip and halfshut eyes, hobbles stiffly on,

unconscious of his anatomical interest. The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the rudder

swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can step on. She is laden with flour from the valley of

the Genesee, and may have started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly manned

by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a fiery haired lady of imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I

explore, is plainly furnished with a cookstove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane language is

allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide imperceptibly down the canal,

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes, but I am aware that less superficial spirits could not be

They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape; they invited themselves to be reminded of passages of

European travel by it;, and they placed villas and castles and palaces upon all the eligible buildingsites.

Ashamed of these devices, presently, Basil patriotically tried to reconstruct the Dutch and Indian past of the

Mohawk Valley, but here he was foiled by the immense ignorance of his wife, who, as a true American

woman, knew nothing of the history of her own country, and less than nothing of the barbarous regions

beyond the borders of her native province. She proved a bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the events

which Basil mentioned; and she had never even heard of the massacres by the French and Indians at

Schenectady, which he in his boyhood had known so vividly that he was scalped every night in his dreams,

and woke up in the morning expecting to see marks of the tomahawk on the headboard. So, failing at last to

extract any sentiment from the scenes without, they turned their faces from the window, and looked about

It was in all respects an ordinary carful of human beings, and it was perhaps the more worthy to be studied on

that account. As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable

character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon the heroic or occasional phases, but will

seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very

precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and a brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast,

natural, unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life and inhabit there, to think his

shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by his stinted

inspirations, to share his foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse selfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world,

if you do not refuse to be amused; and our friends were very willing to be entertained. They delighted in the

precise, thickfingered old ladies who bought sweet apples of the boys come aboard with baskets, and who

were so long in finding the right change, that our travellers, leaping in thought with the boys from the moving

train, felt that they did so at the peril of their lives. Then they were interested in people who went out and

found their friends waiting for them, or else did not find them, and wandered disconsolately up and down

before the country stations, carpetbag in hand; in women who came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken

hands with or sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got seats for them, and placed their bags or their babies

in their laps, and turned for a nod at the door; in young ladies who were seen to places by young men the

latter seemed not to care if the train did go off with them, and then threw up their windows and talked with

girlfriends, on the platform without, till the train began to move, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and

moist red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it, and could not calm themselves to the

dull level of the travel around them; in the conductor, coldly and inaccessibly vigilant, as he went his rounds,

reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his head from time, to time, and listened with a

faint, sarcastic smile to the questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some information

out of him; in the trainboy, who passed through on his many errands with prize candies, gumdrops,

popcorn, papers and magazines, and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impartiality, or a

prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural perception of character in those who received them.

A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as well as the traits common to all railway

travel; and our friends decided that this was not a very welldressed company, and would contrast with the

people on an expresstrain between Boston and New York to no better advantage than these would show

beside the average passengers between London and Paris. And it seems true that on a westering' line, the

blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the

whole person lounges into increasing informality of costume. I speak of the undressful sex alone: woman,

wherever she is, appears in the last attainable effects of fashion, which are now all but telegraphic and

universal. But most of the passengers here were men, and they mere plainly of the freeand easy West rather

than the dapper East. They wore faces thoughtful with the problem of buying cheap and selling dear, and they

could be known by their silence from the loquacious, acquaintancemaking waytravellers. In these, the

mere coming aboard seemed to beget an aggressively confidential mood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at

any means of relieving their ennui; or they felt that they might here indulge safely in the pleasures of

autobiography, so dear to all of us; or else, in view of the many possible catastrophes, they desired to leave

some little memory of themselves behind. At any rate, whenever the train stopped, the wedding journeyers

caught fragments of the personal histories of their fellow passengers which had been rehearsing to those that

sat next the narrators. It was no more than fair that these should somewhat magnify themselves, and put the

best complexion on their actions and the worst upon their sufferings; that they should all appear the luckiest

or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people that ever were, and should all have made or lost the

most money. There was a prevailing desire among them to make out that they came from or were going to

same very large place; and our friends fancied an actual mortification in the face of a modest gentleman who

got out at Penelope (or some other insignificant classical station, in the ancient Greek and Roman part of New

York State), after having listened to the life of a somewhat rustic looking person who had described himself

Basil also found diversion in the tender couples, who publicly comported themselves as if in a sylvan

solitude, and, as it had been on the bank of some umbrageous stream, far from the ken of envious or

unsympathetic eyes, reclined upon each other's shoulders and slept; but Isabel declared that this behavior was

perfectly indecent. She granted, of course, that they were foolish, innocent people, who meant no offense, and

did not feel guilty of an impropriety, but she said that this sort of thing was a national reproach. If it were

merely rustic lovers, she should not care so much; but you saw people who ought to know better,

welldressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotion in the face of the world, and going to sleep on each

other's shoulders on every railroad train. It was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really infamous. Before

she would allow herself to do such a thing she wouldwell, she hardly knew what she would not do; she

would have a divorce, at any rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh at it; and he would make her hate him

From the seat behind their own they were now made listeners to the history of a ten weeks' typhoid fever,

from the moment when the narrator noticed that he had not felt very well for a day or two back, and all at

once a kind of shiver took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly insensible, and could eat nothing but a little

pounded iceand his wife a small woman, tooused to lift him back and forth between the bed and sofa

like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half the time whether he was dead or alive. This history, from

which not the smallest particular or the least significant symptom of the case was omitted, occupied an hour

in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for the entertainment of one who had been five minutes before it began

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailed forth in accents of desperation the words, "O, disgusting!"

The monotony of the narrative in the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat of the day, had lulled her

into slumbers from which she awoke at the stopping of the train, to find her head resting tenderly upon her

She confronted his merriment with eves of mournful rebuke; but as she could not find him, or the harshest

"Never mind, dear, never mind," he coaxed, you were really not responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite

of fortune,whatever you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare say it is sheer,

disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard, swinging from the roof: 'This train stops twenty minutes

for dinner at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have anything edible there, it shall

In a little while they found themselves in an airy, comfortable dining room, eating a dinner, which it seemed

to them France in the flush of her prosperity need not have blushed to serve; for if it wanted a little in the last

graces of art, it redeemed itself in abundance, variety, and wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famishing

passenger stood a beneficent coalblack glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and jacket, serving him with that

alacrity and kindliness and grace which make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his calling, which

disenthrall it of servility, and constitute him your eager host, not your menial, for the moment. From table to

table passed a calming influence in the person of the proprietor, who, as he took his richly earned money,

checked the rising fears of the guests by repeated proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he

would give them due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with

beak and claw, as the vulturelike fashion is, upon everything in reach, remained to eat like Christians; and

even a poor, scantilyEnglished Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars

"O Basil, Basil!" cried Isabel, when the train was again in motion, "have we really dined once more? It seems

too good to be true. Cleanliness, plenty, wholesomeness, civility! Yes, as you say, they cannot be civil where

they are not just; honesty and courtesy go together; and wherever they give you outrageous things to eat, they

add indigestible insults. Basil, dear, don't be jealous; I shall never meet him again; but I'm in love with that

black waiter at our table. I never saw such perfect manners, such a winning and affectionate politeness. He

made me feel that every mouthful I ate was a personal favor to him. What a complete gentleman. There ought

never to be a white waiter. None but negroes are able to render their service a pleasure and distinction to

So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness to be satisfied, a homage perhaps beyond its desert to the good

dinner and the decent service of it. But here they erred in the right direction, and I find nothing more

admirable in their behavior throughout a wedding journey which certainly had its trials, than their willingness

to make the very heat of whatever would suffer itself to be made anything at all of. They celebrated its

pleasures with magnanimous excess, they passed over its griefs with a wise forbearance. That which they

found the most difficult of management was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who

write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical, in this

respect. I even imagine that ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the

lifelike weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence often sufficed my wedded

lovers, or then, when there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their love,

which they were never tired of hearing as they severally knew it. Let it not be a reproach to human nature or

to me if I say that there was something in the comfort of having well dined which now touched the springs of

sentiment with magical effect, and that they had never so rejoiced in these tender reminiscences.

They had planned to stop over at Rochester till the morrow, that they might arrive at Niagara by daylight, and

at Utica they had suddenly resolved to make the rest of the day's journey in a drawingroom car. The change

gave them an added reason for content; and they realized how much they had previously sacrificed to the idea

of travelling in the most American manner, without achieving it after all, for this seemed a touch of

Americanism beyond the oldfashioned car. They reclined in luxury upon the easycushioned, revolving

chairs; they surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of the flyingparlor in which they sat, or turned

their contented regard through the broad plateglass windows upon the landscape without. They said that

none but Americans or enchanted princes in the "Arabian Nights" ever travelled in such state; and when the

stewards of the car came round successively with tropical fruits, icecreams, and claretpunches, they felt a

heightened assurance that they were either enchanted princesor Americans. There were more ladies and

more fashion than in the other cars; and prettily dressed children played about on the carpet; but the general

appearance of the passengers hardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere; and they were plainly in that

car because they were of the American race, which finds nothing too good for it that its money can buy.

They knew none of the hotels in Rochester, and they had chosen a certain one in reliance upon their

handbook. When they named it, there stepped forth a porter of an incredibly cordial and pleasant

countenance, who took their travellingbags, and led them to the omnibus. As they were his only passengers,

the porter got inside with them, and seeing their interest in the streets through which they rode, he descanted

in a strain of cheerful pride upon the city's prosperity and character, and gave the names of the people who

lived in the finer houses, just as if it had been an OldWorld town, and he some eager historian expecting

reward for his comment upon it. He cast quite a glamour over Rochester, so that in passing a body of water,

bordered by houses, and overlooked by odd balconies and galleries, and crossed in the distance by a bridge

upon which other houses were built, they boldly declared, being at their wit's end for a comparison, and taken

with the unhopedfor picturesqueness, that it put them in mind of Verona. Thus they reached their hotel in

almost a spirit of foreign travel, and very willing to verify the pleasant porter's assurance that they would like

it, for everybody liked it; and it was with a sudden sinking of the heart that Basil beheld presiding over the

hair; jeweled studs sparkled in his shirtfront, and rings on his white hands; a gentle disdain of the travelling

public breathed from his person in the mystical odors of Ihlang ihlang. He did not lift his haughty head to

look at the wayfarer who meekly wrote his name in the register; be did not answer him when he begged for a

cool room; he turned to the board on which the keys hung, and, plucking one from it, slid it towards Basil on

the marble counter, touched a bell for a callboy, whistled a bar of Offenbach, and as he wrote the number of

the room against Basil's name, said to a friend lounging near him, as if resuming a conversation, "Well, she's

When I reflect that this was a type of the hotel clerk throughout the United States, that behind unnumbered

registers at this moment he is snubbing travellers into the dust, and that they are suffering and perpetuating

him, I am lost in wonder at the national meekness. Not that I am one to refuse the humble pie his jeweled

fingers offer me. Abjectly I take my key, and creep off up stairs after the callboy, and try to give myself the

genteel air of one who has not been stepped upon. But I think homicidal things all the same, and I rejoice that

in the safety of print I can cry out against the despot, whom I have not the presence to defy. "You vulgar and

cruel little soul," I say, and I imagine myself breathing the words to his teeth, "why do you treat a weary

stranger with this ignominy? I am to pay well for what I get, and I shall not complain of that. But look at me,

and own my humanity; confess by some civil action, by some decent phrase, that I have rights and that they

shall be respected. Answer my proper questions; respond to my fair demands. Do not slide my key at me; do

not deny me the poor politeness of a nod as you give it in my hand. I am not your equal; few men are; but I

Basil found that, for his sin in asking for a cool room, the clerk had given them a chamber into which the sun

had been shining the whole afternoon; but when his luggage had been put in it seemed useless to protest, and

like a true American, like you, like me, he shrank from asserting himself. When the sun went down it would

be cool enough; and they turned their thoughts to supper, not venturing to hope that, as it proved, the

Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evidences of luxury afforded by all the appointments of a hotel so

far west of Boston, and they both began to feel that natural ease and superiority which an inn always inspires

in its guests, and which our great hotels, far from impairing, enhance in flattering degree; in fact, the clerk

once forgotten, I protest, for my own part, I am never more conscious of my merits and riches in any other

place. One has there the romance of being a stranger and a mystery to every one else, and lives in the alluring

They were so late in coming to the supperroom, that they found themselves alone in it. At the door they had

a bow from the headwaiter, who ran before them and drew out chairs for them at a table, and signaled

waiters to serve them, first laying before them with a gracious flourish the bill of fare.

A force of servants flocked about them, as if to contest the honor of ordering their supper; one set upon the

table a heaping vase of strawberries, another flanked it with flagons of cream, a third accompanied it with

Gates of varied flavor and device; a fourth obsequiously smoothed the tablecloth; a fifth, the youngest of the

five, with folded arms stood by and admired the satisfaction the rest were giving. When these had been

dispatched for steak, for broiled whitefish of the lakes, noblest and delicatest of the fish that swim,for

broiled chicken, for fried potatoes, for mums, for whatever the lawless fancy, and ravening appetites of the

wayfarers could suggest, this fifth waiter remained to tempt them to further excess, and vainly proposed some

kind of eggs,fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, or omelette.

"O, you're sure, dearest, that this isn't a vision of fairyland, which will vanish presently, and leave us empty

and forlorn? "plaintively murmured Isabel, as the menial train reappeared, bearing the supper they had

Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon her face, and she let fall her knife and fork. "You don't think,

Basil," she faltered, "that they could have found out we're a bridal party, and that they're serving us so

magnificently becausebecauseO, I shall be miserable every moment we're here!" she concluded

She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a woman with so much broiled whitefish on her plate, and such

a banquet array about her; and her husband made haste to reassure her. "You're still demoralized, Isabel, by

our sufferings at the Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings we enjoy, though I should be sorry to

undervalue them. I suspect it's the custom to use people well at this hotel; or if we are singled out for

uncommon favor, I think: I can explain the cause. It has been discovered by the register that we are from

Boston, and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection, and homage which the name everywhere

"It 's our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and moral virtue of Boston. This supper is not

It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it served. It kindled the local pride of Isabel to selfdefense,

and in the distraction of the effort she forgot her fears; she returned with renewed appetite to the supper, and

in its excellence they both let fall their dispute,which ended, of course, in Basil's abject confession that

Boston was the best place in the world, and nothing but banishment could make him live elsewhere,and

gave themselves up, as usual, to the delight of being just what and where they were. At last, the natural

course brought them to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter approached from the corner of the table at

which he stood, to place the vase near them, he did not retire at once, but presently asked if they were from

He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if he went further, but took heart, then, and asked, "Don't you

think this is a pretty nice hotel"hastily adding as a concession of the probable existence of much finer

They imagined this waiter as new to his station in life, as perhaps just risen to it from some country tavern,

and unable to repress his exultation in what seemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed to have

invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his soul; it was what might

have happened in Italy, only there so much naivete would have meant money; they looked at each other with

rapture. and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed as at a personal compliment: "Yes, it 's a nice

"How perfectly idyllic!" cried Isabel. "Is this Rochester, New York, or is it some vale of Arcady? Let's go out

They walked out into the moonlit city, up and down streets that seemed very stately and fine, amidst a glitter

of shopwindow lights; and then, Less of their own motion than of mere error, they quitted the business

quarter, and found themselves in a quiet avenue of handsome residences, the Beacon Street of Rochester,

whatever it was called. They said it was a night and a place for lovers, for none but lovers, for lovers newly

plighted, and they made believe to bemoan themselves that, hold each other dear as they would, the

exaltation, the thrill, the glory of their younger love was gone. Some of the houses had gardened spaces about

them, from which stole, like breaths of sweetest and saddest regret, the perfume of midsummer flowers,

the despair of the rose for the bud. As they passed a certain house, a song fluttered out of the open window

and ceased, the piano warbled at the final rush of fingers over its chords, and they saw her with her fingers

resting lightly on the keys, and her graceful head lifted to look into his; they saw him with his arm yet

stretched across to the leaves of music he had been turning, and his face lowered to meet her gaze.

And if they knew that we, on our wedding journey, stood outside, would not they wish it was they, here?"

"I suppose so, dearest, and yet, onceuponatime was sweet. Pass on; and let us see what charm we shall

"Yes, it is an enchanted city to us," mused Basil, aloud, as they wandered on, "and all strange cities are

enchanted. What is Rochester to the Rochesterese? A place of a hundred thousand people, as we read in our

guide, an immense flour interest, a great railroad entrepot, an unrivaled nursery trade, a university, two

commercial colleges, three collegiate institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I dare say any

respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over his city. But Rochester is for us, who don't know

it at all, a city of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over piano fortes, of a palatial

hotel with pastoral waiters and porter,a city of handsome streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of

the golden age. The only definite association with it in our minds is the tragically romantic thought that here

"Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud of distresses me. Have you really,

then, never heard of the man who invented the saying, 'Some things can be done as well as others,' and

proved it by jumping over Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this belief, he attempted the leap of the

Genesee Falls. The leap was easy enough, but the coming up again was another matter. He failed in that. It

"Dreadful!" said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. "But what has all that to do with Rochester? "

"Now, my dear, You don't mean to say you didn't know that the Genesee Falls were at Rochester? Upon my

"Then walk to them at once!" cried Isabel, wholly unabashed, and in fact unable to see what he had to be

ashamed of. "Actually, I believe you would have allowed me to leave Rochester without telling me the falls

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief object of their journey had been to visit the scene of Sam

Patch's fatal exploit, and she drew Basil with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroad station,

beyond which he said were the falls. Presently, after threading their way among a multitude of locomotives,

with and without trains attached, that backed and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatiently on every side,

they passed through the station to a broad planking above the river on the other side, and thence, after

encounter of more locomotives, they found, by dint of much asking, a street winding up the hillside to the

left, and leading to the German Bierhaus that gives access to the best view of the cataract.

The Americans have characteristically bordered the river with manufactures, making every drop work its

passage to the brink; while the Germans have as characteristically made use of the beauty left over, and have

built a Bierhaus where they may regale both soul and sense in the presence of the cataract. Our travellers

might, in another mood and place, have thought it droll to arrive at that sublime spectacle through a Bierhaus,

A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival space occupied by many tables, each of which was surrounded by

a group of clamorous Germans of either sex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lager before them, and

slim flasks of Rhenish; overhead flamed the gas in globes of varicolored glass; the walls were painted like

those of such haunts in the fatherland; and the weddingjourneyers were fair to linger on their way, to dwell

upon that scene of honest enjoyment, to inhale the mingling odors of beer and of pipes, and of the pungent

cheeses in which the children of the fatherland delight. Amidst the inspiriting clash of plates and glasses, the

rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse rush of gutturals, they could catch the words Franzosen, Kaiser,

Konig, and Schlacht, and they knew that festive company to be exulting in the first German triumphs of the

war, which were then the day's news; they saw fists shaken at noses in fierce exchange of joy, arms tossed

abroad in wild congratulation, and healthpouring goblets of beer lifted in air. Then they stepped into the

moonlight again, and heard only the solemn organ stops of the cataract. Through gardenground they were

led by the little maid, their guide, to a small pavilion that stood on the edge of the precipitous shore, and

commanded a perfect view of the falls. As they entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers,

passed out, and they were left alone with that sublime presence. Something of definiteness was to be desired

in the spectacle, but there was ample compensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgence and the

dense unluminous shadows of the moonshine invested it. The light touched all the tops of the rapids, that

seemed to writhe sway from the brink of the cataract, and then desperately breaking and perishing to fall, the

white disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the vast and deep ravine through which the river

rushed away. Now the waters seemed to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy

compactness, now to disperse into their multitudinous particles and hang like some vaporous cloud from the

cliff. Every moment renewed the vision of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape; and its loveliness isolated

it, in spite of the great town on the other shore, the station with its bridge and its trains, the mills that supplied

At last Basil pointed out the tablerock in the middle of the fall, from which Sam Patch had made his fatal

leap; but Isabel refused to admit that tragical figure to the honors of her emotions. "I don't care for him!" she

said fiercely. "Patch! What a name to be linked in our thoughts with this superb cataract."

"Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust. It's as good a name as Leander, to my thinking, and it was

immortalized in support of a great idea, the feasibility of all things; while Leander's has come down to us as

that of the weak victim of a passion. We shall never have a poetry of our own till we get over this absurd

reluctance from facts, till we make the ideal embrace and include the real, till we consent to face the music in

our simple common names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones into a tragedy. The Germans are braver than

we, and in them you find facts and dreams continually blended and confronted. Here is a fortunate

illustration. The people we met coming out of this pavilion were lovers, and they had been here

sentimentalizing on this superb cataract, as you call it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be

named. No doubt they had been quoting Uhland or some other of their romantic poets, perhaps singing some

of their tender German lovesongs,the tenderest, unearthliest lovesongs in the world. At the same time

they did not disdain the matteroffact corporeity in which their sentiment was enshrined; they fed it heartily

On a table before them stood a pair of beerglasses, in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the foam of the

generous liquor lately brimming them; some shreds of sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese, bits of cold ham,

Isabel shuddered at the spectacle, but made no comment, and Basil went on: "Do you suppose they scorned

the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed upon the falls? On the contrary, I've no doubt that he recalled to her the

ballad which a poet of their language made about him. It used to go the rounds of the German newspapers,

and I translated it, a long while ago, when I thought that I too was in 'Arkadien geboren'.

"O yes; he did; but I had to yield to our taste, and where he said, I 'Springt der Sam Patsch kuhn and frei',' I

As they passed through the house on their way out, they saw the youth and maiden they had met at the

pavilion door. They were seated at a table; two glasses of beer towered before them; on their plates were

The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the whole earth was gone with the moonlight. By nine o'clock,

when the weddingjourneyers resumed their way toward Niagara, the heat had already set in with the effect

of ordinary midsummer's heat at high noon. The car into which they got had come the past night from

Albany, and had an air of almost conscious shabbiness, griminess, and overuse. The seats were covered with

cinders, which also crackled under foot. Dust was on everything, especially the persons of the crumpled and

weary passengers of overnight. Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lighten the spiritual gloom, and

presently they sank into the common bodily wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated, and as it drew

nearer Buffalo they knew the conductor to have abandoned himself to that blackest of the arts, making time.

The long irregular jolt of the ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick lateral

motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and

quick gusts caught away the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling, and all the faces

on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and damp with apathetic misery.

The incidents were in harmony with the abject physical tone of the company. There was a quarrel between a

thin, shrillvoiced, highly dressed, muchbedizened Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old woman,

half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparent ears that stood out from his head like the handles of a jar,

on the other side, about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept filled with packages

on the pretense that it was engaged. It was a loud and fierce quarrel enough, but it won no sort of favor; and

when the Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no lady, and the boy, who disputed

in an ironical temper, replied, "Highly complimentary, I must say," there was no sign of relief or other

There was a little more interest taken in the misfortune of an old purblind German and his son, who were

found by the conductor to be a few hundred miles out of the direct course to their destination, and were with

some trouble and the aid of an Americanized fellowcountryman made aware of the fact. The old man then

fell back in the prevailing apathy, and the child naturally cared nothing. By and by came the unsparing

trainboy on his rounds, bestrewing the passengers successively with papers, magazines, finecut tobacco,

and packages of candy. He gave the old man a package of candy, and passed on. The German took it as the

bounty of the American people, oddly manifested in a situation where he could otherwise have had little

proof of their care. He opened it and was sharing it with his son when the trainboy came back, and

metallically, like a part of the machinery, demanded, "Ten cents!" The German stared helplessly, and the boy

repeated, "Ten cents! ten cents!" with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled. When it had

passed through the alien's head that he was to pay for this national gift and he took with his tremulous fingers

from the recesses of his pocketbook a tencent note and handed it to his tormentor, some of the people

laughed. Among the rest, Basil and Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other with eyes of mutual

"Well, upon my word, my dear," he said, "I think we've fallen pretty low. I've never felt such a poor, shabby

ruffian before. Good heavens! To think of our immortal souls being moved to mirth by such a thing as

this,so stupid, so barren of all reason of laughter. And then the cruelty of it! What ferocious imbeciles we

"I can't. That's the worst of it. He 's money enough, and might justly take offense. What breaks my heart is

that we could have the depravity to smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who supposed he had at last

met with an act of pure kindness. It's a thing to weep over. Look at these grinning wretches! What a fiendish

effect their smiles have, through their cinders and sweat! O, it's the terrible weather; the despotism of the dust

and heat; the wickedness of the infernal air. What a squalid and loathsome company!"

At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found themselves with several hours' time on their hands before the

train started for Niagara, and in the first moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into saying, "Don't you

think we'd have done better to go directly from Rochester to the Falls, instead of coming this way?"

"I know it, dear. I was only asking," said Isabel, meekly. "But I should think you'd have generosity enough to

take a little of the blame, when I wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you."

This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when Basil made his first visit to Niagara,

he had approached from the west by way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existed

before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his past, was resolved to draw near the

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his hard heartedness. The sigh touched him, and

he suggested a carriageride through the city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had been

thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was taken by surprise. "If ever we leave

Boston," she said, "we will not live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we'll come to Buffalo." She found

that the place had all the picturesqueness of a seaport, without the ugliness that attends the rising and falling

tides. A delicious freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, with no

line between sharper than that which divides drowsing from dreaming. But the color was the most charming

thing, that delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of the seablue, but infinitely softer and lovelier. The

nearer expanses rippled with dainty waves, silver and lucent; the further levels made, with the sundimmed

summer sky, a vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the white sails of ships, and stained by the

"Take me away now," said Isabel, when her eyes had feasted upon all this, "and don't let me see another thing

till I get to Niagara. Nothing less sublime is worthy the eyes that have beheld such beauty."

However, on the way to Niagara she consented to glimpses of the river which carries the waters of the lake

for their mighty plunge, and which shows itself very nobly from time to time as you draw toward the cataract,

with wooded or cultivated islands, and rich farms along its low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye the

shining white of the rapids,a hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness to be revealed.

As the train stopped, Isabel's heart beat with a childlike exultation, as I believe every one's heart must who

is worthy to arrive at Niagara. She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, that she heard the roar of the

cataract, and now, when she alighted from the car, she was sure she should have heard it but for the vulgar

little noises that attend the arrival of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere else. "Never mind, dearest; you

shall be stunned with it before you leave," promised her husband; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode

through the quaint streets of the village, where it remains a question whether the lowliness of the shops and

private houses makes the hotels look so vast, or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings. The

immense caravansaries swelling up from among the little bazaars (where they sell feather fans, and miniature

bark canoes, and jars and vases and bracelets and brooches carved out of the local rocks), made our friends

with their trunks very conscious of their disproportion to the accommodations of the smallest. They were the

sole occupants of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be received at their hotel with a burst of

minstrelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt that a single stringed instrument of some timid note would

have been enough; and Basil was going to express his own modest preference for a jew'sharp, when the

music ceased with a sudden clash of the cymbals. But the next moment it burst out with fresh sweetness, and

in alighting they perceived that another omnibus had turned the corner and was drawing up to the pillared

portico of the hotel. A small family dismounted, and the feet of the last had hardly touched the pavement

when the music again ended as abruptly as those flourishes of trumpets that usher playerkings upon the

stage. Isabel could not help laughing at this melodious parsimony. "I hope they don't let on the cataract and

shut it off in this frugal style; do they, Basil?" she asked, and passed jesting through a pomp of unoccupied

porters and tallboys. Apparently there were not many people stopping at this hotel, or else they were all out

looking at the Falls or confined to their rooms. However, our travellers took in the almost weird emptiness of

the place with their usual gratitude to fortune for all queerness in life, and followed to the pleasant quarters

assigned them. There was time before supper for a glance at the cataract, and after a brief toilet they sallied

out again upon the holiday street, with its parade of gay little shops, and thence passed into the grove beside

the Falls, enjoying at every instant their feeling of arrival at a sublime destination.

In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank with Rome, the metropolis of history and religion; with Venice,

the chief city of sentiment and fantasy. In either you are at once made at home by a perception of its

greatness, in which there is no quality of aggression, as there always seems to be in minor places as well as in

minor men, and you gratefully accept its sublimity as a fact in no way contrasting with your own

Our friends were beset of course by many carriagedrivers, whom they repelled with the kindly firmness of

experienced travel. Isabel even felt a compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Niagara so much as to

have forgotten that the first time one must see it alone or only with the next of friendship. She was voluble in

her pity of Basil that it was not as new to him as to her, till between the trees they saw a white cloud of spray,

shot through and through with sunset, rising, rising, and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten down by

I am not sure but the first emotion on viewing Niagara is that of familiarity. Ever after, its strangeness

increases; but in that earliest moment when you stand by the side of the American fall, and take in so much of

the whole as your giants can compass, an impression of having seen it often before is certainly very vivid.

This may be an effect of that grandeur which puts you at your ease in its presence; but it also undoubtedly

results in part from lifelong acquaintance with every variety of futile picture of the scene. You have its

outward form clearly in your memory; the shores, the rapids, the islands, the curve of the Falls, and the stout

rainbow with one end resting on their top and the other lost in the mists that rise from the gulf beneath. On

the whole I do not account this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The surprise is none the less a surprise

because it is kept till the last, and the marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at once through

a single sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as if Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred to

win your heart with her beauty; and so Isabel, who was instinctively prepared for the reverse, suffered a

vague disappointment, for a little instant, as she looked along the verge from the water that caressed the shore

at her feet before it flung itself down, to the wooded point that divides the American from the Canadian Fall,

beyond which showed dimly through its veil of golden and silver mists the emerald wall of the great

HorseShoe. "How still it is!" she said, amidst the roar that shook the ground under their feet and made the

leaves tremble overhead, and "How lonesome!" amidst the people lounging and sauntering about in every

direction among the trees. In fact that prodigious presence does make a solitude and silence round every spirit

worthy to perceive it, and it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that the rocks and pebbles in the

water's edge, and the weeds and grasses that nod above it, have a value far beyond that of such common

things elsewhere. In all the aspects of Niagara there seems a grave simplicity, which is perhaps a reflection of

the spectator's soul for once utterly dismantled of affectation and convention. In the vulgar reaction from this,

Slowly Isabel became aware that the sacred grove beside the fall was profaned by some very common

presences indeed, that tossed bits of stone and sticks into the consecrated waters, and struggled for

handkerchiefs and fans, and here and there put their arms about each other's waists, and made a show of

laughing and joking. They were a picnic party of rude, silly folks of the neighborhood, and she stood

pondering them in sad wonder if anything could be worse, when she heard a voice saying to Basil, "Take you

next, Sir? Plenty of light yet, and the wind's down the river, so the spray won't interfere. Make a capital

picture of you; falls in the background." It was the local photographer urging them to succeed the young

couple he had just posed at the brink: the gentleman was sitting down, with his legs crossed and his hands

elegantly disposed; the lady was standing at his side, with one arm thrown lightly across his shoulder, while

with the other hand she thrust his cane into the ground; you could see it was going to be a splendid

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trusting as usual to his sympathy for perception of her train of

thought, "Well, I'll never try to be highstrung again. But shouldn't you have thought, dearest, that I might

expect to be highstrung with success at Niagara if anywhere?" She passively followed him into the long,

queer, downwardsloping edifice on the border of the grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood ready,

and descended the incline. Emerging into the light again, she found herself at the foot of the fall by whose top

she had just stood. At first she was glad there were other people down there, as if she and Basil were not

enough to bear it alone, and she could almost have spoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasols

and impertinent little boots, whom their attendant husbands were helping over the sharp and slippery rocks,

so bare beyond the spray, so green and mossy within the fall of mist. But in another breath she forgot them;

as she looked on that dizzied sea, hurling itself from the high summit in huge white knots, and breaks and

masses, and plunging into the gulf beside her, while it sent continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and

crawled away in vast eddies, with somehow a look of human terror, bewilderment, and pain. It was bathed in

snowy vapor to its crest, but now and then heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of

the Falls almost as far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwards how they were able to make use of

but one sense at a time, and how when they strove to take in the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to

hear it; but as soon as they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in them vibrated to the sound, and

the spectacle dissolved away in it. They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, and of a

tendency of each to palter with the things perceived. The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality,

and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of careen marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall

of lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as would hold them together;

and again they could not discern if this course were from above or from beneath, whether the water rose from

the abyss or dropped from the height. The ear could give the brain no assurance of the sound that felled it,

and whether it were great or little; the prevailing softness of the cataract's tone seemed so much opposed to

ideas of prodigious force or of prodigious volume. It was only when the sight, so idle in its own behalf, came

to the aid of the other sense, and showed them the mute movement of each other's lips, that they dimly

"I think you might have been highstrung there, for a second or two," said Basil, when, ascending the incline;

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls they have in late

years woven a web of wire high in air, and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of all the bridges made

with hands it seems the lightest, most ethereal; it is ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers like a

garland. It is worthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara, and to show the traveller the vast

spectacle, from the beginning of the American Fall to the farthest limit of the HorseShoe, with all the awful

pomp of the rapids, the solemn darkness of the wooded islands, the mystery of the vaporous gulf, the

indomitable wildness of the shores, as far as the eye can reach up or down the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by a path that led through another of those groves which keep the

village back from the shores of the river on the American side, and greatly help the sightseer's pleasure in

the place. The exquisite structure, which sways so tremulously from its towers, and seems to lay so slight a

hold on earth where its cables sink into the ground, is to other bridges what the blood horse is to the common

breed of roadsters; ant now they felt its sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them

as they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their sympathy with the bridge's trepidation

was too great for unalloyed delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there; and

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that sprung from the base of the Falls with a mournful, tremulous

grace, and a movement weird as the play of the northern lights. They were touched with the most delicate

purples and crimsons, that darkened to deep red, and then faded from them at a second look, and they flew

upward, swiftly upward, like troops of pale, transparent ghosts; while a perfectly clear radiance, better than

any other for local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under the bridge the river smoothly swam, the

undercurrents forever unfolding themselves upon the surface with a vast roselike evolution, edged all round

with faint lines of white, where the air that filled the water freed itself in foam. What had been clear green on

the face of the cataract was here more like rich verdantique, and had a look of firmness almost like that of

the stone itself. So it showed beneath the bridge, and down the river till the curving shores hid it. These,

springing abruptly prom the water's brink, and shagged with pine and cedar, displayed the tender verdure of

grass and bushes intermingled with the dark evergreens that comb from ledge to ledge, till they point their

speary tops above the crest of bluffs. In front, where tumbled rocks and expanses of caked clay varied the

gloomier and gayer green, sprung those spectral mists; and through them loomed out, in its manifold majesty,

Niagara, with the seemingly immovable white Gothic screen of the American Fall, and the green massive

curve of the Horseshoe, solid and simple and calm as an Egyptian wall; while behind this, with their white

and black expanses broken by dark foliaged little isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed down between

The weddingjourneyers hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the sight; and then, looking back from

the shore to the spot where they had stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess itself of all, and

that the bridge should swing there in midair like a filmy web, scarce more passable than the rainbow that

On the portico of the hotel they found half a score of gentlemen smoking, and creating together that collective

silence which passes for sociality on our continent. Some carriages stood before the door, and within, around

the base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle callboys. There were a few trunks heaped together in one place, with

a porter standing guard over them; a solitary guest was buying a cigar at the newspaper stand in one corner;

another friendless creature was writing a letter in the readingroom; the clerk, in a seersucker coat and a

lavish shirtbosom, tried to give the whole an effect of wateringplace gayety and bustle, as he provided a

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and repose with indifference. If the hotel had been thronged with

brilliant company, they would have been no more and no less pleased; and when, after supper, they came into

the grand parlor, and found nothing there but a marbletopped centre. table, with a silverplated icepitcher

and a small company of goblets, they sat down perfectly content in a secluded windowseat. They were not

seen by the three people who entered soon after, and halted in the centre of the room.

"Why, Kitty!" said one of the two ladies who must; be in any travelling party of three, "this is more

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for social conquest, in some kind of airy eveningdress, and was

looking round with bewilderment upon that forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a

smile, that she had not seen so much of the world yet as she had been promised; but she liked Niagara very

"No," said the other lady, who was as unquiet as Kitty was calm, and who seemed resolved to make the most

of the worst, "it isn't probable that the hotel will fill up overnight; and I feel personally responsible for this

state of things. Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would be so empty? I thought the place was

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a longcontinued discussion elsewhere of the matter in hand, and he

"Then you don't care for Kitty's pleasure at all, and you don't want her to enjoy herself. Why don't you take

"Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Niagara in the most satisfactory way, it wouldn't add a soul to the

"Do you think it's because it's such a hot summer? Do you suppose it's not exactly the season? Didn't you

expect there'd be more people? Perhaps Niagara isn't as fashionable as it used to be."

"Perhaps," interposed Kitty, placidly, "most of the visitors go to the other hotel, now."

"It 's altogether likely," said the other lady, eagerly. "There are just such caprices."

"I know it. I didn't want to come here for that reason. But fortune favors the brave."

"Well, it's too bad! Here we've asked Kitty to come to Niagara with us, just to give her a little peep into the

world, and you've brought us to a hotel where we're" "Monarchs of all we survey," suggested Kitty.

"Come now, Fanny," said the gentleman, who was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker. "You know

you insisted, against all I could say or do, upon coming to this house; I implored you to go to the other, and

"So I do. If you'd let me have my own way without opposition about coming here, I dare my I should have

gone to the other place. But never mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope. She 's your cousin,"

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently folded in her lap. She now rose and said that she did not know

"It can't be. There can't be two hotels so empty," said Fanny. "It don't stand to reason."

"If you wish Kitty to see the world so much," said the gentleman, "why don't you take her on to Quebec, with

Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was moving with a listless content about the parlor.

"I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she's only come for the night, and has nothing with her but a

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its charm upon her, for, after a silence, "I could lend her some

things," she said musingly. "But don't speak of it tonight, please. It's too ridiculous. Kitty!" she called out,

and, as the young lady drew near, she continued, "How would you like to go to Quebec, with us?"

"Why, very well, I think. You've got this dress, and your travelling suit; and I can lend yon whatever you

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and the gentleman followed. To their own relief the guiltless

eavesdroppers, who found no moment favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy began, issued

"What a remarkable little lady!" said Basil, eagerly turning to Isabel for sympathy in his enjoyment of her

"Yes, poor thing!" returned his wife; "it's no light matter to invite a young lady to take a journey with you,

and promise her all sorts of gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find her on your hands in a

Basil stared. "O, certainly," he said. "But what an amusingly illogical little body!"

"I don't understand what you mean, Basil. It was the only thing that she could do, to invite the young lady to

go on with them. I wonder her husband had the sense to think of it first. Of course she'll have to lend her

"And you didn't observe anything peculiar in her way of reaching her conclusions?"

"Why, her blaming her husband for letting her have her own way about the hotel; and her telling him not to

mention his proposal to Kitty, and then doing it herself, justafter she'd pronounced it absurd and

impossible." He spoke with heat at being forced to make what he thought a needless explanation.

"O!" said Isabel, after a moment's reflection. "That! Did you think it so very odd?"

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man must feel when he begins to perceive that he has married

the whole mystifying world of womankind in the woman of his choice, and made no an., ewer. But to his

own soul he said: "I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance. It seems I have been flattering

The next morning they went out as they had planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after an early

breakfast. As they sauntered through the village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, they

praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday character of the place, enjoying equally the lounging tourists at the

hotel doors, the drivers and their carriages to let, and the little shops, with nothing but mementos of Niagara,

and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery, to sell. Shops so useless, they agreed, could not be found outside

the Palms Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world but here. They felt themselves

once more a part of the tide of mere sight seeing pleasuretravel, on which they had drifted in other days,

and in an eddy of which their love itself had opened its white blossom, and lilylike dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of newly wedded bliss, which, involving the whole land during

the season of bridaltours, may be said to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of a

precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one out of his honeymoon

is in some degree an alien there, and must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for his profane

eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility must desire to veil his face,

and, bowing his excuses to the collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside world to which he

belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and brides. Three or four with the benediction still on them, come down

in the same car with him; he hands her travellingshawl after one as she springs from the omnibus into her

husband's arms; there are two or three walking back and forth with their new lords upon the porch of the

hotel; at supper they are on every side of him, and he feels himself suffused, as it were, by a roseate

atmosphere of youth and love and hope. At breakfast it is the same, and then, in his wanderings about the

place he constantly meets them. They are of all manners of beauty, fair and dark, slender and plump, tall and

short; but they are all beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved. Now, if ever in their lives, they

are charmingly dressed, and ravishing toilets take the willing eye from the objects of interest. How high the

heels of the pretty boots, how small the tender. tinted gloves, how electrical the flutter of the snowy skirts!

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sisterhood to these blessed souls; but she secretly rejoiced in it, even

while she joined Basil in noting their number and smiling at their innocent abandon. She dropped his arm at

encounter of the first couple, and walked carelessly at his side; she made a solemn vow never to take hold of

his watchchain in speaking to him; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting her face very close

to his at dinner in studying the bill of fare; getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the

waist. All ascetic resolutions are modified by experiment; but if Isabel did not rigorously keep these, she is

Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Island, they passed a little group of the Indians still lingering

about Niagara, who make the barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and, like the woods and the wild

faces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep the cataract remote, and to invest it with the charm of primeval

loneliness. This group were women, and they sat motionless on the ground, smiling sphinxlike over their

laps full of beadwork, and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation upon the passers. They wore bright

kirtles, and red shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and down their comfortable

persons. A little girl with them was attired in like gayety of color. � "What is her name?" asked Isabel, paying

for a bead pincushion. "Daisy Smith," said her mother, in distressingly good English. "But her Indian name?"

"She has none," answered the woman, who told Basil that her village numbered five hundred people, and that

they were Protestants. While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whom the women saluted musically

in their native tongue. This was somewhat consoling; but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and it could have

"Still," said Isabel, as they turned away, "I'm glad he hasn't Lisle thread gloves, like that chieftain we saw

putting his forest queen on board the train at Oneida. But how shocking that they should be Christians, and

Protestants! It would have been bad enough to have them Catholics. And that woman said that they were

On the bridge, they paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their wild

variety, with the white crests of breaking surf, the dark massiveness of heavyclimbing waves, the fleet,

smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spellbound, the journeyers pored upon the deathful course beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the horror of

being cast upon it, and then hurried over the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose wildness they

There had been rain in the night; the air war full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twittering

birds. Presently they came to a bench set in a corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vista of sunlit

foliage, with a mere gleam of the foaming river beyond. As they sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the

early days of their courtship, began to recite a poem. It was one which had been haunting him since his first

sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart in his youththe rhyme of some poor

newspaper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly

clipping his name from the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil's memory, rather from the interest of the

awful fact it recorded, than from any merit of its own; and now he recalled it with a distinctness that surprised

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore, Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous

roar, Out of the hell of the rapids as 'twere a lost soul's cries Heard and could not believe; and the morning

mocked their eyes, Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran Raving round him and

past, the visage of a man Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught Fast in the rocks

below, scarce out of the surges raught. Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung Shrill, above

Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned, Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled

and wound, And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon, As it had been in some blessed

trance, and now it is noon. Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it strong and stanch, And to the lines and

the treacherous rocks look well as yon launch Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foamsprent sides,

Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides, Onward rushes the raft, with many a lurch and

leap, Lord! if it strike him loose from the hold he scarce can keep! No! through all peril unharmed, it

reaches him harmless at least, And to its proven strength he lashes his weakness fast. Now, for the shore! But

steady, steady, my men, and slow; Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so, let her go! Thronging

the shores around stands the pitying multitude; Wan as his own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to

brood Heavy upon them, and heavy the silence hangs on all, Save for the rapids' plunge, and the thunder of

the fall. But on a sudden thrills from the people still and pale, Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate

wail Caught on a lurking point of rock it sways and swings, Sport of the pitiless waters, the raft to which he

All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways; And on the shore the crowd lifts up its hands and prays: Lifts

to heaven and wrings the hands so helpless to save, Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock and

the ways Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife Straggles to help his helpers, and fights

so hard for his life, Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon. Priceless second by

second, so wastes the afternoon. And it is sunset now; and another boat and the last Down to him from the

Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay Maddening against the gate that is locked

athwart his way. "No! we keep the bridge for them that can help him. You, Tell us, who are you?" "His

brother!" "God help you both! Pass through." Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud to him, Unto

the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim; But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering words are

lost As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed. And from the bridge he sees his brother sever

the rope Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope; Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry,

Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flying free; Sees, then, the form that, spent with effort and

fasting and fear, Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near, Caught in the longbaffled

clutch of the rapids, and rolled and hurled Headlong on to the cataract's brink, and out of the world.

"O Basil!" said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking the hush that best praised the unknown poet's skill, "it isn't

"Every word, almost, even to the brother's coming at the last moment. It's a very wellknown incident," he

added, and I am sure the reader whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly every point of interest about the place has killed its man, and

there might well be a deeper stain of crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching the falls. Its

beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy as the lightesthearted tourist could desire. The

abominable savages, revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of demoniacal misery

and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily

driving out these squalid devilworshippers; the French planting the fort that yet guards the mouth of the

river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole

Niagara country; the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of France and England; the

awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians

over the precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon the American settlements in

the Revolution by the savages who prepared their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of

Chippewa and of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of the fall; the savage forays

with tomahawk and scalpingknife, and the blazing villages on either shore in the War of 1812,these are

the memories of the place, the links in a chain of tragical interest scarcely broken before our time since the

white man first beheld the mistveiled face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect as Basil, in

the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories,those

precious books that make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European days, and

illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom,

and then, lacking this light, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of the guidebooks. He and Isabel

enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles of other times from

the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long

as their own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly

exercised their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power;

only they refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years

in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of

design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that

dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews

of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem,

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands every year. The shrubbery and

undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day,

they met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the hotels should be so full, and that the

wilderness should also abound in them; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of

interest and danger, were these newwedded lovers with their interlacing arms and their fond attitudes, in

which each seemed to support and lean upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil

and Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the island, and glanced up the broad

swift stream to the point where it ran smooth before breaking into the rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature in

the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the

foreground of every famous American landscape; and when I think of the amount of public lovemaking in

the season of pleasuretravel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from the parks of Colorado to the

Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth century is

the golden age, and that we want very little of being a nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having traversed the island by a path through the

heart of the woods, and now drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant have an

eternal novelty, and they beheld the evervarying effect of that constant sublimity with the sense of

discoverers, or rather of people whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new from the

creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the

shores, dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a wild fluttering of

their nerves, a rapture with an underconsciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they

came to the three little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out into the furious channel.

Three pretty suspensionbridges connect them now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders

a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments of

wilderness, clumps of vinetangled woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination

of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded from exploring them. It wants no

courage to do this, but merely submission to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward than

the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no human being had perhaps set foot. She

grossed from bridge to bridge with a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence,

through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the heaving and tossing flood beyond,

from every wave of which at every instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told

heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil another revelation of character. Without

the slightest warning she sank down at the root of a tree, and said, with serious composure, that she could

never go back on those bridges; they were not safe. He stared at her cowering form in blank amaze, and put

his hands in his pockets. Then it occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and he said,

"O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!" implored Isabel. "You see yourself the Midges are not safe.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his knees at her side, and took her hands in his. "Isabel! Isabel!

Are you crazy?" he cried, as if he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered in reply; he said, to

mend matters, that it was a jest, about the boat; and he was driven to despair when Isabel repeated, "I never

He would try sarcasm. "Do you intend to set up a hermitage here, and have your meals sent out from the

hotel? It's a charming spot, and visited pretty constantly; but it's small, even for a hermitage."

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered that he was not ashamed to make fun of

"Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids," she said, looking up fiercely. "The bridges "are not safe. I'm not a child,

"I don't know," said Basil, gloomily. "It's an exigency for which I wasn't prepared." Then he silently gave

himself to the Evil One, for having probably overwrought Isabel's nerves by repeating that poem about

Avery, and by the ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to enjoy so much. He asked her if that

was it; and she answered, "O no, it's nothing but the bridges." He proved to her that the bridges, upon all

known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give way. She shook her head, but made no

"Don't say anything you'll be sorry for afterwards, Basil," she replied, with the forbearance of those who have

The rapids beat and shouted round their little prisonisle, each billow leaping as if possessed by a separate

demon. The absurd horror of the situation overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore, for

she might spring from his grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to call for help; and what if nobody

came till she lost her mind from terror? Or, what if somebody should come and find them in that ridiculous

"Isabel!" he shouted in her ear, "here come those people we saw in the parlor last night."

Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil's with her icy hand, rose, drew her arm convulsively

In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly "repaired her drooping head and tricked her beams" again.

He could see her tearfully smiling through her veil. "My dear," he said, "I don't ask an explanation of your

fright, for I don't suppose you could give it. But should you mind telling me why those people were so

"Why, dearest! Don't you understand? That Mrs. Richardwhoever she is is so much like me."

She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfying statement, and he thought he had better not ask

further then, but wait in hope that the meaning would come to him. They walked on in silence till they came

to the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a notice that persons have been killed by pieces of rock from the

precipice overhanging the shore below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabel declined to

visit the Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower.

"Thanks; no," said her husband. "You might find it unsafe to come back the way you went up. We can't count

certainly upon the appearance of the lady who is so much like you; and I've no fancy for spending my life on

Terrapin Tower." So he found her a seat, and went alone to the top of the audacious little structure standing

on the verge of the cataract, between the smooth curve of the HorseShoe and the sculptured front of the

Central Fall, with the stormy sea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen through the mists, crawling

away between its lofty bluffs before. He knew again the awful delight with which so long ago he had watched

the changes in the beauty of the Canadian Fall as it hung a mass of translucent green from the brink, and a

pearly white seemed to crawl up from the abyss, and penetrate all its substance to the very crest, and then

suddenly vanished from it, and perpetually renewed the same effect. The mystery of the rising vapors veiled

the gulf into which the cataract swooped; the sun shone, and a rainbow dreamed upon them.

Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge, and here Basil saw an elderly

gentleman skipping from one slippery stone to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss,

who, when he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank bridge. Basil, who

had descended by this time, made bold to say that he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous.

The gentleman took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a distinguished

phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

"On your bridal tour, I presume," he continued, as they approached the bench where Basil had left Isabel. She

had now the company of a plain, middleaged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward

festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. "Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara, and my

wife 's been here once before on the same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table

Rock with the others. Now that's all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move on?" he asked; and this bridal pair

passed up the path, attended, haply, by the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table next Basil's, and they were all now talking cheerfully over the

"Well, Kitty," the married lady was saying, you can tell the girls what you please about the gayeties of

"O yes, indeed," said Kitty, "I've got a good deal of it made up already. I'll describe a grand hop at the hotel,

with fashionable people from all parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most. I'm going to

have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long blond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this

morning and he's got to do duty in accounting for my missing glove. It'll never do to tell the girls I dropped it

from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny, I really can say something about dining with

This referred to the sadfaced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo as a

Southerner probably coming North for the first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a

halfbarbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its way. He sat with his wife at a table

farther down the room, and their child was served in part by a little tancolored nursemaid. The fact did not

quite answer to the young lady's description of it, and get it certainly afforded her a groundwork. Basil

fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he used to come every

"Yes," he said, "I can't account for him except as the ghost of Southern travel, and I can't help feeling a little

sorry for him. I suppose that almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are fast

growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the remains of the feudal system in the kind

of poetry they produce. The impoverished slaveholder is a pathetic figure, in spite of all justice and reason,

the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and it is of no use to think of Andersonville in his presence.

This gentleman, and others like him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent the money they

did not earn like princes; they held their heads high; they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair; they

received the homage of the doughface in his home. They came up here from their riceswamps and

cottonfields, and bullied the whole busy civilization of the North. Everybody who had merchandise or

principles to sell truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphal progress. Now they're moneyless

and subjugated (as they call it), there's none so poor to do them reverence, and it's left for me, an Abolitionist

from the cradle, to sigh over their fate. After all, they had noble traits, and it was no great wonder they got, to

despise us, seeing what most of us were. It seems to me I should like to know our friend. I can't help feeling

towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feels

There were not above a dozen other people in tie room, and Basil contrasted the scene with that which the

same place formerly presented. "In the old time," he said, "every table was full, and we dined to the music of

a brass band. I can't say I liked the band, but I miss it. I wonder if our Southern friend misses it? They gave us

a very small allowance of brass band when we arrived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder what's come over the

place," he said, as the Southern party, rising from the table, walked out of the diningroom, attended by many

treacherous echoes in spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters made.

After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is

not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of

infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have

revered the cataract as a demon; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the business like

composure of the man who shows off the hellbroth) is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara

gradually changes from a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all odds, too, the most tremendous view of

the Falls is afforded by the point on the drive whence you look down upon the HorseShoe, and behold its

three massive walls of sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone, and the smooth brink

Would they not go to the battlefield of Lundy's Lane? asked the driver at a certain point on their return; but

Isabel did not care for battle fields, and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence of his former visit.

"They have a sort of tower of observation built on the battle ground," he said, as they drove on down by the

river, "and it was in charge of an old Canadian militiaman, who had helped his countrymen to be beaten in

the fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible account of the battle, asking me first if I had ever

heard of General Scott, and adding without flinching that here he got his earliest laurels. He seemed to go just

so long to every listener, and nothing could stop him short, so I fell into a revery until he came to an end. It

was hard to remember, that sweet summer morning, when the sun shone, and the birds sang, and the music of

a piano and a girl's voice rose from a bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with

battlesmoke, that the peaceful fields had been planted with cannon, instead of potatoes and corn, and that

where the cows came down the farmer's lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men had befallen. The

blue and tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away rolled the beautiful land, with farmhouses, fields,

and woods, and at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past seemed only a vagary of

mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior at my elbow? grieved though I was to find that a habit of strong

drink had the better of his utterance that morning. My driver explained afterwards, that persons visiting the

field were commonly so much pleased with the captain's eloquence, that they kept the noble old soldier in a

brandy andwater rapture throughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing his memory, and making the

battle bloodier and bloodier as the season advanced and the number of visitors increased. There my dear," he

suddenly broke off, as they came in sight of a slender stream of water that escaped from the brow of a cliff on

the American side below the Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery mist, "that's the Bridal Veil; and I

suppose you think the stream, which is making such a fine display, yonder, is some idle brooklet, ending a

long course of error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge. It's nothing of the kind; it's an honest

hydraulio canal, of the most straightforward character, a poor but respectable millrace which has devoted

itself strictly to business, and has turned millwheels instead of fooling round waterlilies. It can afford that

ultimate finery. What you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry."

"What I can't help thinking of," said Isabel, who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal Veil, or

anything about it, "is the awfulness of stepping off these places in the nighttime." She referred to the road

which, next the precipice, is unguarded by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but

we manage things differently on our continent, and carriages go running over the brink from time to time.

"If your thoughts have that direction," answered her husband, "we had better go back to the hotel, and leave

the Whirlpool for tomorrow morning. It's late for it today, at any rate." He had treated Isabel since the

adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious, but which he could

"I'm not afraid," she sighed, "but in the words of the retreating soldier, II'm awfully demoralized;" and

added, "You know we must reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this evening."

Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to Boston by way of Montreal and Quebec,

and it was part of their pleasure to get these of the heartiest imaginable ticketagent. He was a colonel or at

least a major, and he made a polite feint of calling Basil by some military title. He commended the trip they

were about to make as the most magnificent and beautiful on the whole continent, and he commended them

for intending to make it. He said that was Mrs. General Bowdur of Philadelphia who just went out; did they

know her? Somehow, the titles affected Basil as of older date than the late war, and as belonging to the

militia period; and he imagined for the agent the romance of a life spent at a wateringplace, in contact with

rich moneyspending, pleasure taking people, who formed his whole jovial world. The Colonel, who

included them in this world, and thereby brevetted them rich and fashionable, could not secure a stateroom

for them on the boat,a perfectly splendid Lake steamer, which would take them down the rapids of the St.

Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change,but he would give them a letter to the captain, who was a

very particular friend of his, and would be happy to show them as his friends every attention; and so he wrote

a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all reason making him feel for the moment that he

was privileged by a document which was no doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in a loud cheerful

voice; he laughed jollily at no apparent joke; he bowed very low and said, "GOODevening!" at parting, and

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixture of

quaintness and commonplaceness; in hanging about the shopWindows with their monotonous variety of

feather fans,each with a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre,moccasons,

beadwrought workbags, tobaccopouches, bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the

neighboring squaws can invent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricing many things, and in hanging

long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of

vase, inoperative pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological formations at Niagara,

tormented meantime by the heat of the gaslights and the persistence of the mosquitoes. There were very few

people besides themselves in the shops, and Isabel's purchases were not lavish. Her husband had made up his

mind to get her some little keepsake; and when he had taken her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops,

and hastily bought her a feather fan,a magnificent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue, with a

whole yellowbird transfixed in the centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, "Who's that for,

Basil?" demanded his wife; "the cook?" But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, "O

you poor old tasteless darling! You've got it for me!" and seemed about to die of laughter.

"Didn't you start and throw up your hands," he stammered, "when ,you came to that case of fans?"

"Yes, in horror! Did you think I liked the cruel things, with their dead birds and their hideous colors? O

Basil, dearest! You are incorrigible. Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues that the

perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature? Now, my love, just promise me one thing," she said

pathetically. "We're going to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhaps you'll be wanting to

surprise me with something there. Don't do it. Or if you must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the

color of it's to be; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there'll be some taste about it, and I shall be

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something about exchanging it. "No," she said,

"we'll keep it as aamonument." And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud

height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day. So completely were their places

changed, that he doubted if it were not he who had made that scene on the Third Sister; and when Isabel said,

"O, why won't men use their reasoning faculties?" he could not for himself have claimed any, and he could

not urge the truth: that he had bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty. She would

not let him get angry, and he could say nothing against the halfironical petting with which she soothed his

But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning they spent a charming hour about Prospect Point,

and in sauntering over Goat Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place on whose wonders they

had so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first. They had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they

loftily marveled at the greed with which newercomers plunged at the sensations. They could not conceive

why people should want to descend the inclined railway to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at the

idea of going up Terrapin Tower; they derided the vulgar daring of those who went out upon the Three Weird

Sisters; for some whom they saw about to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had no

Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool, mistakenly going down on the American side, for it is

much better seen from the other, though seen from any point it is the most impressive feature of the whole

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland seas of the North, Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and the

multitude of smaller lakes, all pour their floods, where they swirl in dreadful vortices, with resistless

undercurrents boiling beneath the surface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from this scene of secret power, so

different from the thunderous splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a height of two

hundred feet, clothed from the water's edge almost to their create with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your

senses perceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then, drunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away to

Ontario through the narrow channel of the river. Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that you do

not know the half of its terribleness; for those waters that look so smooth are great ridges and rings, forced,

by the impulse of the currents, twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin. Nothing can live there, and

with what is caught in its hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls and tosses round and round in its

toils, with a sad, maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories, which even their telling does not wholly

rob of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried into the whirlpool and made to enact upon its

dizzy surges a travesty of life, apparently floating there at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid the

waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the death that has long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway suspension bridge, is an elevator more than a hundred and

eighty feet high, which is meant to let people down to the shore below, and to give a view of the rapids on

their own level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure of pine sticks, but is doubtless

stronger than it looks; and at any rate, as it has never yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced perfectly safe.

In the waitingroom at the top, Basil and Isabel found Mr. Richard and his ladies again, who got into the

movable chamber with them, and they all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind,

either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the

structure, where it was darkened by a rough weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light

showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of the

An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingled in Isabel's heart with a doubt of the value of the scene

below, and she could not look forward to escape from her present perils by the conveyance which had

brought her into them, with any satisfaction. She wanly smiled, and shrank closer to Basil; while the other

matron made nothing of seizing her husband violently by the arm and imploring him to stop it whenever they

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out of their prison by a humid young Englishman, with much clay

on him, whose face was red and bathed in perspiration, for it was very hot down there in his little inclosure of

baking pine boards, and it was not much cooler out on the rocks upon which the party issued, descending and

descending by repeated and desultory flights of steps, till at last they stood upon a huge fragment of stone

right abreast of the rapids. Yet it was a magnificent sight, and for a moment none of them were sorry to have

come. The surges did not look like the gigantic ripples on a river's course as they were, but like a procession

of ocean billows; they arose far aloft in vast bulks of clear green, and broke heavily into foam at the crest.

Great blocks and shapeless fragments of rock strewed the margin of the awful torrent; gloomy walls of dark

stone rose naked from these, bearded here and there with cedar, and everywhere frowning with shaggy brows

of evergreen. The place is inexpressibly lonely and dreadful, and one feels like an alien presence there, or as

if he had intruded upon some mood or haunt of Nature in which she had a right to be forever alone. The

slight, impudent structure of the elevator rises through the solitude, like a thing that merits ruin, yet it is better

than something more elaborate, for it looks temporary, and since there must be an elevator, it is well to have

it of the most transitory aspect. Some such quality of rude impermanence consoles you for the presence of

most improvements by which you enjoy Niagara; the suspension bridges for their part being saved from

Ascending, none of the party spoke; Isabel and the other matron blanched in each other's faces; their

husbands maintained a stolid resignation. When they stepped out of their trap into the waiting room at the

top, "What I like about these little adventures," said Mr. Richard to Basil, abruptly, "is getting safely out of

them. Goodmorning, sir." He bowed slightly to Isabel, who returned his politeness, and exchanged faint

nods, or glances, with the ladies. They got into their separate carriages, and at that safe distance made each

"Well," observed Basil, "I suppose we're introduced now. We shall be meeting them from time to time

throughout our journey. You know how the same faces and the same trunks used to keep turning up in our

travels on the other side. Once meet people in travelling, and you can't get rid of them."

"Yes," said Isabel, as if continuing his train of thought, "I'm glad we're going today."

"Truly. When we first arrived I felt only the loveliness of the place. It seemed more familiar, too, then; but

ever since, it's been growing stranger and dreadfuller. Somehow it's begun to pervade me and possess me in a

very uncomfortable way; I'm tossed upon rapids, and flung from cataract brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools;

I'm no longer yours, Basil; I'm most unhappily married to Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my awful

She lightly burlesqued the woes of a prima donna, with clasped hands and uplifted eyes.

"That'll do very well," Basil commented, "and it implies a reality that can't be quite definitely spoken. We

come to Niagara in the patronizing spirit in which we approach everything nowadays, and for a few hours we

have it our own way, and pay our little tributes of admiration with as much complacency as we feel in

acknowledging the existence of the Supreme Being. But after a while we are aware of some potent influence

undermining our selfsatisfaction; we begin to conjecture that the great cataract does not exist by virtue of

our approval, and to feel that it will not cease when we go away. The second day makes us its abject slaves,

and on the third we want to fly from it in terror. I believe some people stay for weeks, however, and hordes of

"I can't understand it, at all," said Isabel. "I don't wonder now that the town should be so empty this season,

but that it should ever be full. I wish we'd gone after our first look at the Falls from the suspension bridge.

How beautiful that was! I rejoice in everything that I haven't done. I'm so glad I haven't been in the Cave of

the Winds; I'm so happy that Table Rock fell twenty years ago! Basil, I couldn't stand another rainbow today.

I'm sorry we went out on the Three Weird Sisters. O, I shall dream about it! and the rush, and the whirl, and

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a moment's oblivion, and then rose radiant with a question: "Why

in the world, if Niagara is really what it seems to us now, do so many bridal parties come here?"

"Perhaps they're the only people who've the strength to bear up against it, and are not easily dispersed and

"Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who knows how it would be if you were nineteen instead of

"No, no. But don't you see how it is? We've known too much of life to desire any gloomy background for our

happiness. We're quite contented to have things gay and bright about us. Once we couldn't have made the

circle dark enough. Well, my dear, that's the effect of age. We're superannuated."

I used to think I was before we were married," answered Isabel simply; "but now," she added triumphantly,

"I'm rescued from all that. I shall never be old again, dearest; never, as long as you love me!"

They were about to enter the village, and he could not make any open acknowledgment of her tenderness; but

her silken mantle (or whatever) slipped from her shoulder, and he embracingly replaced it, flattering himself

that he had delicately seized this chance of an unavowed caress and not allowing (O such is the blindness of

our sex!) that the opportunity had been yet more subtly afforded him, with the art which women never disuse

They had an early dinner, and looked their last upon the nuptial gayety of the otherwise forlorn hotel. Three

brides sat down with them in travellingdress; two occupied the parlor as they passed out; half a dozen happy

pairs arrived (to the music of the band) in the omnibus that was to carry our friends back to the station; they

caught sight of several about the shop windows, as that drove through the streets. Thus the place perpetually

renews itself in the glow of love as long as the summer lasts. The moon which is elsewhere so often of

wormwood, or of the ordinary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from the first of June to the

last of October; and this is a great charm in Niagara. I think with tenderness of all the lives that have opened

so fairly there; the hopes that have reigned in the glad young hearts; the measureless tide of joy that ebbs and

flows with the arriving and departing trains. Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and of fashion,

there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak: but here only youth, faith, rapture. I kiss my hand to Niagara for

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towards the weak sisterhood of evident brides, and both our

friends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara at the last moment. I do not know how much of their content was

due to the fact that they had suffered no sort of wrong there, from those who are apt to prey upon travellers.

In the hotel a placard warned them to have nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen on the streets, but

always to order their carriage at the office; on the street the hackmen whispered to them not to trust the

exorbitant drivers in league with the landlords; yet their actual experience was great reasonableness and facile

This may have been because the hackmen so far outnumbered the visitors, that the latter could dictate terms;

but they chose to believe it a triumph of civilization; and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their faith. Only

at the station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt, by the hotel porter who professed to find Basil's

trunk enfeebled by travel, and advised a strap for it, which a friend of his would sell for a dollar and a half.

They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte, the port of Rochester, and they rattled uneventfully

down from Niagara by rail. At the broad, lowbanked rivermouth the steamer lay beside the railroad station;

and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basil looked to the transfer of the baggage, novelly comforted

in the business by the respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for the boat. He

was slow, and his system was not good,he did not give checks for the pieces, but marked them with the

name of their destination; and there was that indefinable something in his manner which hinted his hope that

you would remember the porter; but he was so civil that he did not snub the meekest and most vexatious of

the passengers, and Basil mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white Americans, he said to himself, would

behave so decently in his place; and he could not conceive of the American steamboat clerk who would use

the politeness towards a waiting crowd that the Canadian purser showed when they all wedged themselves in

about his window to receive their stateroom keys. He was somewhat awkward, like the porter, but he was

patient, and he did not lose his temper even when some of the crowd, finding he would not bully them, made

bold to bully him. He was three times as long in serving them as an American would have been, but their

time was of no value there, and he served them well. Basil made a point of speaking him fair, when his turn

came, and the purser did not trample on him for a base truckler, as an American jackinoffice would have

Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer, which was very comfortable, and in every way sufficient

for its purpose, with a visible captain, who answered two or three questions very pleasantly, and bore himself

In the saloon Isabel had found among the passengers her semi acquaintances of the hotel parlor and the

Rapidselevator, and had glanced tentatively towards them. Whereupon the matron of the party had made

advances that ended in their all sitting down together and wondering when the boat would start, and what

time they would get to Montreal next evening, with other matters that strangers going upon the same journey

may properly marvel over in company. The introduction having thus accomplished itself, they exchanged

addresses, and it appeared that Richard was Colonel Ellison, of Milwaukee, and that Fanny was his wife.

Miss Kitty Ellison was of Western New York, not far from Erie. There was a diversion presently towards the

different staterooms; but the new acquaintances sat visavas at the table, and after supper the ladies drew

their chairs together on the promenade deck, and enjoyed the fresh evening breeze. The sun set magnificent

upon the low western shore which they had now left an hour away, and a broad stripe of color stretched

behind the steamer. A few thin, luminous clouds darkened momently along the horizon, and then mixed with

the land. The stars came out in a clear sky, and a light wind softly buffeted the cheeks, and breathed life into

nerves that the day's heat had wasted. It scarcely wrinkled the tranquil expanse of the lake, on which loomed,

far or near, a fullsailed schooner, and presently melted into the twilight, and left the steamer solitary upon

the waters. The company was small, and not remarkable enough in any way to take the thoughts of any one

off his own comfort. A deep sense of the coziness of the situation possessed them all which was if possible

intensified by the spectacle of the captain, seated on the upper deck, and smoking a cigar that flashed and

fainted like a stationary firefly in the gathering dusk. How very distant, in this mood, were the most recent

events! Niagara seemed a fable of antiquity; the ride from Rochester a myth of the Middle Ages. In this pool,

happy world of quiet lake, of starry skies, of air that the soul itself seemed to breathe, there was such

consciousness of repose as if one were steeped in rest and soaked through and through with calm.

The points of likeness between Isabel and Mrs. Ellison shortly made them mutually uninteresting, and,

leaving her husband to the others, Isabel frankly sought the companionship of Miss Kitty, in whom she found

a charm of manner which puzzled at first, but which she presently fancied must be perfect trust of others

"Can't you see, Basil, what a very flattering way it is? "she asked of her husband, when, after parting with

their friends for the night, she tried to explain the character to him. "Of course no art could equal such a

natural gift; for that kind of belief in your goodnature and sympathy makes you feel worthy of it, don't you

know; and so you can't help being goodnatured and sympathetic. This Miss Ellison, why, I can tell you, I

shouldn't be ashamed of her anywhere.' By anywhere Isabel meant Boston, and she went on to praise the

young lady's intelligence and refinement, with those expressions of surprise at the existence of civilization in

a westerner which westerners find it so hard to receive graciously. Happily, Miss Ellison had not to hear

them. "The reason she happened to come with only two dresses is, she lives so near Niagara that she could

come for one day, and go back the next. The colonel's her cousin, and he and his wife go East every year, and

they asked her this time to see Niagara with them. She told me all over again what we eavesdropped so

shamefully in the hotel parlor;and I don't know whether she was better pleased with the prospect of what's

before her, or with the notion of making the journey in this original way. She didn't force her confidence

upon me, any more than she tried to withhold it. We got to talking in the most natural manner; and she

seemed to tell these things about herself because they amused her and she liked me. I had been saying how

my trunk got left behind once on the French side of Mont Cenis, and I had to wear aunt's things at Turin till it

"Well, I don't see but Miss Ellison could describe you to her friends very much as you've described her to

me," said Basil. "How did these mutual confidences begin? Whose trustfulness first flattered the other's?

"Why, dearest! I wanted to know, for once, you see, whether we seemed honeymoonstruck."

"No," came the answer, somewhat ruefully. "Perhaps, Basil," she added, "we've been a little too successful in

disguising our bridal character. Do you know," she continued, looking him anxiously in the face, "this Miss

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter. "One more such victory," he said, "and we are undone;" and he

laughed again, immoderately. "How sad is the fruition of human wishes! There 's nothing, after all, like a

Isabel did not listen to him. Safe in a dim corner of the deserted saloon, she seized him in a vindictive

embrace; then, as if it had been he who suggested the idea of such a loathsome relation, hissed out the hated

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at the Canadian city of Kingston, a handsome place, substantial to

the water's edge, and giving a sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built. There was an

accession of many passengers here, and they and the people on the wharf were as little like Americans as

possible. They were English or Irish or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old World still upon their

faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty; so that one must wonder if the line between the Dominion

and the United States did not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These provincials had not

our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn sensibility of expression; but neither had they

our complexions of adobe; and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole, better

dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been in a city of that size and remoteness.

The stevedores who were putting the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly way with the

orangewomen and the old women picking up chips on the pier; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years ago; of Count Frontenac's

splendid advent among the Indians; of the brave La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of wars with

the savages and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their allies harried from this point;

of the destruction of La Salle's fort in the Old French War; and of final surrender a few years later to the

English. It is as picturesque as it is historical. All about the city, the shores are beautifully wooded, and there

are many lovely islands,the first indeed of those Thousand Islands with which the head of the St. Lawrence

is filled, and among which the steamer was presently threading her way. They are still as charming and still

almost as wild as when, in 1673, Frontenac's flotilla of canoes passed through their labyrinth and issued upon

the lake. Save for a lighthouse upon one of them, there is almost nothing to show that the foot of man has

ever pressed the thin grass clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its green in the eternal shadow of

their pines and cedars. In the warm morning light they gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel,

which some of them almost touched with the plumage of their evergreens; and where none of them were

large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race of waterbirds

assembling and separating in her course. It is curiously affecting to find them so unclaimed yet from the

solitude of the vanished wilderness, and scarcely touched even by tradition. But for the interest left them by

the French, these tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed for their beauty alone.

There is indeed about them a faint light of legend concerning the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several

patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their lovely multitude; but this episode of modern history is

difficult for the imagination to manage, and somehow one does not take sentimentally even to that daughter

of a lurking patriot, who long baffled her father's pursuers by rowing him from one island to another, and

Either the reluctance is from the natural desire that so recent a heroine should be founded on fact, or it is mere

perverseness. Perhaps I ought to say; in justice to her, that it was one of her own sex who refused to be

interested in her, and forbade Basil to care for her. When he had read of her exploit from the guidebook,

Isabel asked him if he had noticed that handsome girl in the blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat,

who had come aboard at Kingston. She pointed her out, and courageously made him admire her beauty,

which was of the most bewitching Canadian type. The young girl was redeemed by her New World birth

from the English heaviness; a more delicate bloom lighted her cheeks; a softer grace dwelt in her movement;

yet she was round and full, and she was in the perfect flower of youth. She was not so ethereal in her

loveliness as an American girl, but she was not so nervous and had none of the painful fragility of the latter.

Her expression was just a little vacant, it must be owned; but so far as she went she was faultless. She looked

like the most tractable of daughters, and as if she would be the most obedient of wives. She had a blameless

taste in dress, Isabel declared; her costume of blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set upon heavy

masses of dark brown hair) being completed by a black silk skirt. "And you can see," she added, "that it's an

old skirt made over, and that she's dressed as cheaply as she is prettily." This surprised Basil, who had

imputed the young lady's personal sumptuousness to her dress, and had thought it enormously rich. When she

got off with her chaperone at one of the poorestlooking country landings, she left them in hopeless

conjecture about her. Was she visiting there, or was the interior of Canada full of such stylish and exquisite

creatures? Where did she get her taste, her fashions, her manners? As she passed from sight towards the

shadow of the woods, they felt the poorer for her going; yet they were glad to have seen her, and on second

thoughts they felt that they could not justly ask more of her than to have merely existed for a few hours in

their presence. They perceived that beauty was not only its own excuse for being, but that it flattered and

At Prescott, the boat on which they had come from Charlotte, and on which they had been promised a

passage without change to Montreal, stopped, and they were transferred to a smaller steamer with the

uncomfortable name of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirm and dirty, and in every way bore out the

character of a squalid Irish goblin. Besides, she was already heavily laden with passengers, and, with the

addition of the other steamer's people had now double her complement; and our friends doubted if they were

not to pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort. Their fellowpassengers were in great variety,

however, and thus partly atoned for their numbers. Among them of course there was a full force of brides

from Niagara and elsewhere, and some curious forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared. It is well

enough, if she likes, and it may even be very noble for a passably goodlooking young lady to marry a

gentleman of venerable age; but to intensify the idea of self devotion by furtively caressing his wrinkled

front seems too reproachful of the general public; while, on the other hand, if the bride is very young and

pretty, it enlists in behalf of the whitehaired husband the unwilling sympathies of the spectator to see her the

centre of a group of young people, and him only acknowledged from time to time by a Parthian snub.

Nothing, however, could have been more satisfactory than the sisterly surrounding of this latter bride. They

were of a better class of Irish people; and if it had been any sacrifice for her to marry so old a man, they were

doing their best to give the affair at least the liveliness of a wake. There were five or six of those great

handsome girls, with their generous curves and wholesome colors, and they were every one attended by a

goodlooking colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly brogued voices, and laughed with careless

Celtic laughter. One of the young fellows presently lost his hat overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief

of his lady about his head; and this appeared to be really one of the best things in the world, and led to

endless banter. They were well dressed, and it could be imagined that the ancient bridegroom had come in for

the support of the whole goodlooking, healthy, lighthearted family. In some degree he looked it, and wore

but a rueful countenance for a bridegroom; so that a very young newly married couple, who sat next the jolly

sisterandloverhood could not keep their pitying eyes off his downcast face. "What if he, too, were young at

For the sake of the slight air that was stirring, and to have the best view of the Rapids, the Banshee's whole

company was gathered upon the forward promenade, and the throng was almost as dense as in a sixo'clock

horsecar out from Boston. The standing and sitting groups were closely packed together, and the expanded

parasols and umbrellas formed a nearly unbroken roof. Under this Isabel chatted at intervals with the

Ellisons, who sat near; but it was not an atmosphere that provoked social feeling, and she was secretly glad

It was deadly hot, and most of the people saddened and silenced in the heat. From time to time the clouds

idling about overhead met and sprinkled down a cruel little shower of rain that seemed to make the air less

breathable than before. The lonely shores were yellow with drought; the islands grew wilder and barrener; the

course of the river was for miles at a stretch through country which gave no signs of human life. The St.

Lawrence has none of the bold picturesqueness of the Hudson, and is far more like its faroff cousin the

Mississippi. Its banks are low like the Mississippi's, its current, swift, its way through solitary lands. The

same sentiment of early adventure hangs about each: both are haunted by visions of the Jesuit in his priestly

robe, and the soldier in his mediaeval steel; the same gay, devout, and dauntless race has touched them both

with immortal romance. If the water were of a dusky golden color, instead of translucent green, and the

shores and islands were covered with cottonwoods and willows instead of dark cedars, one could with no

great effort believe one's self on the Mississippi between Cairo and St. Louis, so much do the great rivers

strike one as kindred in the chief features of their landscape. Only, in tracing this resemblance you do not

know just what to do with the purple mountains of Vermont, seen vague against the horizon from the St.

Lawrence, or with the quaint little French villages that begin to show themselves as you penetrate farther

down into Lower Canada. These look so peaceful, with their dormerwindowed cottages clustering about

their churchspires, that it seems impossible they could once have been the homes of the savages and the

cruel peasants who, with firebrand and scalpingknife and tomahawk, harassed the borders of New England

for a hundred years. But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St. Regis, in which was

kindled the torch that wrapt Deerfield in flames, waking her people from their sleep to meet instant death or

taste the bitterness of a captivity. The bell which was sent out from France for the Indian converts of the

Jesuits, and was captured by an English ship and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it

called the Puritans to prayer, till at last it also summoned the priestled Indians and 'habitans' across hundreds

of miles of winter and of wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration,this fateful bell still hangs in the

churchtower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and vespers for nearly two centuries the children of

those who fought so pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it. Our friends would fair have heard it as

they passed, hoping for some mournful note of history in its sound; but it hung silent over the silent hamlet,

which, as it lay in the hot afternoon sun by the river's side, seemed as lifeless as the Deerfield burnt long ago.

They turned from it to look at a gentleman who had just appeared in a mustardcolored linen duster, and

Basil asked, "Shouldn't you like to know the origin, personal history, and secret feelings of a gentleman who

goes about in a duster of that particular tint? Or, that gentleman yonder with his eye tied up in a wet

handkerchief, do you suppose he's travelling for pleasure? Look at those young people from Omaha: they

haven't ceased flirting or cackling since we left Kingston. Do you think everybody has such spirits out at

Omaha? But behold a yet more surprising figure than any we have yet seen among this boatload of

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a face of somewhat foreign cast, and well dressed, with a certain

impressive difference from the rest in the cut of his clothes. But what most drew the eye to him was a large

cross, set with brilliants, and surmounted by a heavy doubleheaded eagle in gold. This ornament dazzled

from a conspicuous place on the left lappet of his coat; on his hand shone a magnificent diamond ring, and he

bore a stately operaglass, with which, from time to time, he imperiously, as one may say, surveyed the

landscape. As the imposing apparition grew upon Isabel, "O here," she thought, "is something truly

distinguished. Of course, dear," she added aloud to Basil, "he's some foreign nobleman travelling here"; and

she ran over in her mind the newspaper announcements of patrician visitors from abroad and tried to identify

him with some one of them. The cross must be the decoration of a foreign order, and Basil suggested that he

was perhaps a member of some legation at Washington, who had ran up there for his summer vacation. The

cross puzzled him, but the doubleheaded eagle, he said, meant either Austria or Russia; probably Austria,

"Yes, indeed! What an air he has. Never tell me. Basil, that there's nothing in blood! " cried Isabel, who was a

bitter aristocrat at heart, like all her sex, though in principle she was democratic enough. As she spoke, the

object of her regard looked about him on the different groups, not with pride, not with hauteur, but with a

glance of unconscious, unmistakable superiority. "O, that stare!" she added; nothing but high birth and long

descent can give it! Dearest, he's becoming a great affliction to me. I want to know who he is. Couldn't you

"No, I couldn't do it decently; and no doubt he'd snub me as I deserved if I intruded upon him. Let's wait for

"Well, I suppose I must, but it's dreadful; it's really dreadful. You can easily see that's distinction," she

continued, as her hero moved about the promenade and gently but loftily made a way for himself among the

other passengers and favored the scenery through his operaglass from one point and another. He spoke to no

In the mean time it was drawing near the hour of dinner, but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one, two came and

went, and then at last came the dinner, which had been delayed, it seemed, till the cook could recruit his

energies sufficiently to meet the wants of double the number he had expected to provide for. It was

observable of the officers and crew of the Banshee, that while they did not hold themselves aloof from the

passengers in the disdainful American manner, they were of feeble mind, and not only did everything very

slowly (in the usual Canadian fashion), but with an inefficiency that among us would have justified them in

being insolent. The people sat down at several successive tables to the worst dinner that ever was cooked; the

ladies first, and the gentlemen afterwards, as they made conquest of places. At the second table, to Basil's

great satisfaction, he found a seat, and on his right hand the distinguished foreigner.

"Naturally, I was somewhat abashed," he said in the account he was presently called to give Isabel of the

interview, "but I remembered that I was an American citizen, and tried to maintain a decent composure. For

several minutes we sat silent behind a dish of flabby cucumbers, expecting the dinner, and I was wondering

whether I should address him in French or German,for I knew you'd never forgive me if I let slip such a

"But I do. After that I took courage to ask what his cross and double headed eagle meant. He showed the

condescension of a true nobleman. 'O,' says he, 'I 'm glad you like it, and it 's not the least offense to ask,' and

he told me. "Can you imagine what it is? It 's the emblem of the fiftyfourth degree in the secret society he

"Well, ask him yourself, then," returned Basil; "he 's a very good fellow. 'O, that stare! nothing but high birth

and long descent could give it!'" he repeated, abominably implying that he had himself had no share in their

What retort Isabel might have made cannot now be known, for she was arrested at this moment by a rumor

amongst the passengers that they were coming to the Long Sault Rapids. Looking forward she saw the

tossing and flashing of surges that, to the eye, are certainly as threatening as the rapids above Niagara. The

steamer had already passed the Deplau and the Galopes, and they had thus had a foretaste of whatever

pleasure or terror there is in the descent of these nine miles of stormy sea. It is purely a matter of taste, about

shooting the rapids of the St. Lawrence. The passengers like it better than the captain and the pilot, to guesses

by their looks, and the women and children like it better than the men. It is no doubt very thrilling and

picturesque and wildly beautiful: the children crow and laugh, the women shout forth their delight, as the boat

enters the seething current; great foaming waves strike her bows, and brawl away to the stern, while she dips,

and rolls, and shoots onward, light as a bird blown by the wind; the wild shores and islands whirl out of sight;

you feel in every fibre the career of the vessel. But the captain sits in front of the pilothouse smoking with a

grave face, the pilots tug hard at the wheel; the hoarse roar of the waters fills the air; beneath the smoother

sweeps of the current you can see the brown rocks; as you sink from ledge to ledge in the writhing and

twisting steamer, you have a vague sense that all this is perhaps an achievement rather than an enjoyment.

When, descending the Long Sault, you look back up hill, and behold those billows leaping down the steep

slope after you, "No doubt," you confide to your soul, "it is magnificent; but it is not pleasure." You greet

with silent satisfaction the level river, stretching between the Long Sault and the Coteau, and you admire the

delightful tranquillity of that beautiful Lake St. Francis into which it expands. Then the boat shudders into the

Coteau Rapids, and down through the Cedars and Cascades. On the rocks of the last lies the skeleton of a

steamer wrecked upon them, and gnawed at still by the whitetusked wolfish rapids. No one, they say, was

lost from her. "But how," Basil thought, "would it fare with all these people packed here upon her bow, if the

Banshee should swing round upon a ledge? "As to Isabel, she looked upon the wrecked steamer with

indifference, as did all the women; but then they could not swim, and would not have to save themselves. The

They passed the Lake St. Louis; the La Chin; rapids flashed into sight. The captain rose up from his seat, took

his pipe from his mouth, and waved a silence with it. "Ladies and gentlemen," said he, "it's very important in

passing these rapids to keep the boat perfectly trim. Please to remain just as you are."

It was twilight, for the boat was late. From the Indian village on the shore they signaled to know if he wanted

the local pilot; the captain refused; and then the steamer plunged into the leaping waves. From rock to rock

she swerved and sank; on the last ledge she scraped with a deadly touch that went to the heart.

Then the danger was passed, and the noble city of Montreal was in full sight, lying at the foot of her dark

green mountain, and lifting her many spires into the rosy twilight air: massive and grand showed the sister

Basil had hoped to approach this famous city with just associations. He had meant to conjure up for Isabel's

sake some reflex, however faint, of that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has painted of Maisonneuve founding

and consecrating Montreal. He flushed with the recollection of the historian's phrase; but in that moment

there came forth from the cabin a pretty young person who gave every token of being a pretty young actress,

even to the duennalike, elderly female companion, to be detected in the remote background of every young

actress. She had flirted audaciously during the day with some young Englishmen and Canadians of her

acquaintance, and after passing the La Chine Rapids she had taken the hearts of all the men by springing

suddenly to her feet, apostrophizing the tumult with a charming attitude, and warbling a delicious bit of song.

Now as they drew near the city the Victoria Bridge stretched its long tube athwart the river, and looked so

"I wonder," said one of the actress's adorers, a Canadian, whose face was exactly that of the beaver on the

escutcheon of his native province, and whose heavy gallantries she had constantly received with a gay,

"No, sir!" answered the pretty young actress with shocking promptness, "we're going right over it!"

At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian looked very sheepishfor a beaver; and all the other people

laughed; but the noble historical shades of Basil's thought vanished in wounded dignity beyond recall, and

The feeling of foreign travel for which our tourists had striven throughout their journey, and which they had

known in some degree at Kingston and all the way down the river, was intensified from the first moment in

Montreal; and it was so welcome that they were almost glad to lose money on their greenbacks, which the

conductor of the omnibus would take only at a discount of twenty cents. At breakfast next morning they

could hardly tell on what country they had fallen. The waiters had but a thin varnish of English speech upon

their native French, and they spoke their own tongue with each other; but most of the meats were cooked to

the English taste, and the whole was a poor imitation of an American hotel. During their stay the same

commingling of usages and races bewildered them; the shops were English and the clerks were commonly

French; the carriagedrivers were often Irish, and up and down the streets with their pious oldfashioned

names, tinkled American horse cars. Everywhere were churches and convents that recalled the ecclesiastical

and feudal origin of the city; the great tubular bridge, the superb waterfront with its long array of docks only

surpassed by those of Liverpool, the solid blocks of business houses, and the substantial mansions on the

Our friends cared far less for the modern splendor of Montreal than for the remnants of its past, and for the

features that identified it with another faith and another people than their own. Isabel would almost have

confessed to any one of the blackrobed priests upon the street; Basil could easily have gone down upon his

knees to the whitehooded, palefaced nuns gliding among the crowd. It was rapture to take a carriage, and

drive, not to the cemetery, not to the public library, not to the rooms of the Young Men's Christian

Association, or the grain elevators, or the new park just tricked out with rockwork and sprigs of evergreen,

not to any of the charming resorts of our own cities, but as in Europe to the churches, the churches of a

pitiless superstition, the churches with their atrocious pictures and statues, their lingering smell of the

morning's incense, their confessionals, their feetaking sacristans, their worshippers dropped here and there

upon their knees about the aisles and saying their prayers with shut or wandering eyes according as they were

old women or young! I do not defend the feeble sentimentality, call it wickedness if you like, but I

They went first, of course, to the French cathedral, pausing on their way to alight and walk through the

Bonsecours Market, where the habitans have all come in their carts, with their various stores of poultry, fruit,

and vegetables, and where every cart is a study. Here is a simplefaced young peasantcouple with butter

and eggs and chickens ravishingly displayed; here is a smoothchecked, blackeyed, blackhaired young girl,

looking as if an infusion of Indian blood had darkened the red of her cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions,

potatoes, beets, and turnips; there an old woman with a face carven like a walnut, behind a flattering array of

cherries and pears; yonder a whole family trafficking in loaves of brownbread and maplesugar in many

shapes of pious and grotesque device. There are gay shows of bright scarfs and kerchiefs and vari colored

yarns, and sad shows of old clothes and secondhand merchandise of other sorts; but above all prevails the

abundance of orchard and garden, while within the fine edifice are the stalls of the butchers, and in the

basement below a world of household utensils, glassware, hard ware, and woodenware. As in other Latin

countries, each peasant has given a personal interest to his wares, but the bargains are not clamored over as in

Latin lands abroad. Whatever protest and concession and invocation of the saints attend the transacting of

business at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued tone. The fat hucksterwomen drowsing beside their wares,

scarce send their voices beyond the borders of their broad brimmed straw hats, as they softly haggle with

At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst paintings in the world, and the massive pineboard pillars are

unscrupulously smoked to look like marble; but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been St. Peter's; in fact it

has something of the barnlike immensity and impressiveness of St. Peter's. They did not ask it to be beautiful

or grand; they desired it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondly cherished hideousness and incongruity

of the average Catholic churches of their remembrance, and it did this and more: it added an effect of its own;

it offered the spectacle of a swarthy old Indian kneeling before the high altar, telling his beads, and saying

with many sighs and tears the prayers which it cost so much martyrdom and heroism to teach his race. "O, it

is only a savage man," said the little French boy who was showing them the place, impatient of their interest

in a thing so unworthy as this groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly about from object to object, rapidly

lecturing their inattention. "It is now time to go up into the tower," said he, and they gladly made that

toilsome ascent, though it is doubtful if the ascent of towers is not too much like the ascent of mountains ever

to be compensatory. From the top of Notre Dame is certainly to be had a prospect upon which, but for his

fluttered nerves and trembling muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller might well look with delight,

and as it is must behold with wonder. So far as the eye reaches it dwells only upon what is magnificent. All

the features of that landscape are grand. Below you spreads the city, which has less that is merely mean in it

than any other city of our continent, and which is everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices, adorned by

tasteful churches, and skirted by full foliaged avenues of mansions and villas. Behind it rises the beautiful

mountain, green with woods and gardens to its crest, and flanked on the east by an endless fertile plain, and

on the west by another expanse, through which the Ottawa rushes, turbid and dark, to its confluence with the

St. Lawrence. Then these two mighty streams commingled flow past the city, lighting up the vast Champaign

country to the south, while upon the utmost southern verge, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits of

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur, their hearts were humbled to the tacit admission that the

colonial metropolis was not only worthy of its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled by any of

the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic. Long before they quitted Montreal they had rallied from

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those who have climbed it, and most of these

are Americans, who flock in great numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life, and the objects

of interest thrive upon their bounty. Our friends met them at every turn, and knew them at a glance from the

native populations, who are also easily distinguishable from each other. The French Canadians are nearly

always of a peasantlike commonness, or where they rise above this have a bourgeois commonness of face

and manner, and the English Canadians are to be known from the many English sojourners by the effort to

look much more English than the latter. The social heart of the colony clings fast to the mothercountry, that

is plain, whatever the political tendency may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebrate this

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those whose lives were passed in the joint

service of England and her loyal child; and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the

sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud reverence. Here, at least, was a people not

cut off from its past, but holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in history. It

gave a glamour of olden time to the new land; it touched the prosaic democratic present with the waning

poetic light of the aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was here and there a title on the tablets, and

there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the

dust. It is a beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if you are so happy, you are rather curtly told you

may enter by a burly English figure in some kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet

precincts you may feel yourself in England if you like,which, for my part, I do not. Neither did our friends

enjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits, with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling,

its architectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its blackeyed peasant girl telling her beads before a side

altar, just as in the enviably deplorable countries we all love; nor so much even as the Irish cathedral which

they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cathedral indeed, painted and gilded 'a merveille', and everywhere

stuck about with big and little saints and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly badbut for those in the French

cathedral. There is, of course, a series representing Christ's progress to Calvary; and there was a very tattered

old man, an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned in whiskey, and who now spoke in a

ghostly whisper, who, when he saw Basil's eye fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and

"Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and then pay him for it?" Isabel asked.

"O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles of other lands and days, that I couldn't help it," he answered;

and straightway in the eyes of both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to the

They were always doing something of this kind, those absurdly sentimental people, whom yet I cannot find it

in my heart to blame for their folly, though I could name ever so many reasons for rebuking it. Why, in fact,

should we wish to find America like Europe? Are the ruins and impostures and miseries and superstitions

which beset the traveller abroad so precious, that he should desire to imagine them at every step in his own

hemisphere? Or have we then of our own no effective shapes of ignorance and want and incredibility, that we

must forever seek an alien contrast to our native intelligence and comfort? Some such questions this guilty

couple put to each other, and then drove off to visit the convent of the Gray Nuns with a joyful expectation

which I suppose the prospect of the finest publicschool exhibition in Boston could never have inspired. But,

indeed, since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not well that there are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleasure

The convent is at a good distance from the Irish cathedral, and in going to it the tourists made their driver

carry them through one of the few old French streets which still remain in Montreal. Fires and improvements

had made havoc among the quaint horses since Basil's first visit; but at last they came upon a narrow, ancient

Rue Saint Antoine, or whatever other saint it was called after,in which there was no English face or

house to be seen. The doors of the little onestory dwellings opened from the pavement, and within you saw

fat madame the mother moving about her domestic affairs, and spare monsieur the elderly husband smoking

beside the open window; French babies crawled about the tidy floors; French martyrs (let us believe

Lalement or Brebeuf, who gave up their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada) sifted their eyes in

highcolored lithographs on the wall; among the flowerpots in the dormerwindow looking from every tin

roof sat and sewed a smooth haired young girl, I hope,the romance of each little mansion. The antique and

foreign character of the place was accented by the inscription upon a wall of "Sirop adoucissant de Madame

Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made refuge within the ample borders of their convent for infirm old

people and for foundling children, and it is now in the regular course of sightseeing for the traveller to visit

their hospital at noonday, when he beholds the Sisters at their devotions in the chapel. It is a bare,

whitewalled, coldlooking chapel, with the usual paraphernalia of pictures and crucifixes. Seated upon low

benches on either side of the aisle were the curious or the devout; the former in greater number and chiefly

Americans, who were now and then whispered silent by an old pauper zealous for the sanctity of the place. At

the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by two, followed by the lady superior with a prayerbook in her

hand. She clapped the leaves of this together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to kneel again and rise, while

they repeated in rather harsh voices their prayers, and then clattered out of the chapel as they had clattered in,

with resounding shoes. The two young girls at the head were very pretty, and all the pale faces had a

corpselike peace. As Basil looked at their pensive sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest girls might

very well be the twain that he had seen here so many years ago, stricken forever young in their joyless

beauty. The ungraceful gowns of coarse gray, the blue checked aprons, the black crape caps, were the same;

they came and went with the same quick tread, touching their brows with holy water and kneeling and rising

now as then with the same constrained and ordered movements. Would it be too cruel if they were really the

same persons? or would it be yet more cruel if every year two girls so young and fair were selfdoomed to

The visitors went about the hospital, and saw the old men and the little children to whom these good pure

lives were given, and they could only blame the system, not the instruments or their work. Perhaps they did

not judge wisely of the amount of selfsacrifice involved, for they judged from hearts to which love was the

whole of earth and heaven; but nevertheless they pitied the Gray Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfort of

their convent, the unnatural care of those alien little ones. Poor 'Soeurs Grises' in their narrow cells; at the

bedside of sickness and age and sorrow; kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the bloody

spectacle of the cross! the power of your Church is shown far more subtly and mightily in such as you,

than in her grandest fanes or the sight of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests, swinging censers,

tapers and pictures and images, under a gloomy heaven of cathedral arches. There, indeed, the faithful have

given their substance; but here the nun has given up the most precious part of her woman's nature, and all the

"There are some things that always greatly afflict me in the idea of a new country," said Basil, as they

loitered slowly through the grounds of the convent toward the gate. "Of course, it's absurd to think of men as

other than men, as having changed their natures with their skies; but a new land always does seem at first

thoughts like a new chance afforded the race for goodness and happiness, for health and life. So I grieve for

the earliest dead at Plymouth more than for the multitude that the plague swept away in London; I shudder

over the crime of the first guilty man, the sin of the first wicked woman in a new country; the trouble of the

first youth or maiden crossed in love there is intolerable. All should be hope and freedom and prosperous life

upon that virgin soil. It never was so since Eden; but none the less I feel it ought to be; and I am oppressed by

the thought that among the earliest walls which rose upon this broad meadow of Montreal were those built to

immure the innocence of such young girls as these and shut them from the life we find so fair. Wouldn't you

like to know who was the first that took the veil in this wild new country? Who was she, poor soul, and what

was her deep sorrow or lofty rapture? You can fancy her some Indian maiden lured to the renunciation by the

splendor of symbols and promises seen vaguely through the lingering mists of her native superstitions; or

some weary soul, sick from the vanities and vices, the bloodshed and the tears of the Old World, and eager

for a silence profounder than that of the wilderness into which she had fled. Well, the Church knows and

From time to time there had fallen little fitful showers during the morning. Now as the weddingjourneyers

passed out of the convent gate the rain dropped soft and thin, and the gray clouds that floated through the sky

"We shall have time for the drive round the mountain before dinner," said Basil, as they got into their carriage

again; and he was giving the order to the driver, when Isabel asked how far it was.

"O, then we can't think of going with one horse. You know," she added, "that we always intended to have two

"No," said Basil, not yet used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge. "And I don't see why

"I had a party from the States, ma'am, yesterday," interposed the driver; "two ladies, real heavy apes, two

gentlemen, weighin' two hundred apiece, and a stout young man on the box with me. You'd 'a' thought the

"Then his horse must be perfectly worn out today," said Isabel, refusing to admit the pool fellow directly

even to the honors of a defeat. He had proved too much, and was put out of court with no hope of repairing

"Why, it seems a pity," whispered Basil, dispassionately, "to turn this man adrift, when he had a reasonable

"O yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do! Why don't you sentimentalize his helpless, overworked horse? all in

"Well, rain or shine, darling, I don't want to go round the mountain with one horse; and it 's very unkind of

"Now, this is a little too much, Isabel. You know we never mentioned the matter till this moment."

"It 's the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn't. But I don't ask you to keep your word. I don't want

In a moment it had come, the first serious dispute of their wedded life. It had come as all such calamities

come, from nothing, and it was on them in full disaster ere they knew. Such a very little while ago, there in

the convent garden, their lives had been drawn closer in sympathy than ever before; and now that blessed

time seemed ages since, and they were further asunder than those who have never been friends. "I thought,"

bitterly mused Isabel, "that he would have done anything for me." "Who could have dreamed that a woman of

her sense would be so unreasonable," he wondered. Both had tempers, as I know my dearest reader has (if a

lady), and neither would yield; and so, presently, they could hardly tell how, for they were aghast at it all,

Isabel was alone in her room amidst the ruins of her life, and Basil alone in the onehorse carriage, trying to

drive away from the wreck of his happiness. All was over; the dream was past; the charm was broken. The

sweetness of their love was turned to gall; whatever had pleased them in their loving moods was loathsome

now, and the things they had praised a moment before were hateful. In that baleful light, which seemed to

dwell upon all they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment, how poor and stupid and empty looked their

wedding journey! Basil spent five minutes in arraigning his wife and convicting her of every folly and fault.

In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidings he found himself suddenly become her ardent advocate, and

ready to denounce her judge as a heartless monster. "On our wedding journey, too! Good heavens, what an

incredible brute I am!" Then he said, "What an ass I am!" And the pathos of the case having yielded to its

absurdity, he was helpless. In five minutes more he was at Isabel's side, the onehorse carriage driver

dismissed with a handsome pourboire, and a pair of lusty bays with a glittering barouche waiting at the door

below. He swiftly accounted for his presence, which she seemed to find the most natural thing that could be,

and she met his surrender with the openness of a heart that forgives but does not forget, if indeed the most

She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life, amidst which she had heartbrokenly sat down with all her

"So did I," he answered. "I am much too good and noble to sacrifice my preference to my duty."

"I didn't care particularly for the two horses, Basil," she said, as they descended to the barouche. "It was your

"And I didn't want the onehorse carriage. It was your insisting so that provoked me."

"Do you think people ever quarreled before on a wedding journey?" asked Isabel as they drove gayly out of

"Never! I can't conceive of it. I suppose if this were written down, nobody would believe it."

"No, nobody could," said Isabel, musingly, and she added after a pause, "I wish you would tell me just what

you thought of me, dearest. Did you feel as you did when our little affair was broken off, long ago? Did you

"I did, most cordially; but not half so much as I despised myself the next moment. As to its being like a

lover's quarrel, it wasn't. It was more bitter, so much more love than lovers ever give had to be taken back.

Besides, it had no dignity, and a lover's quarrel always has. A lover's quarrel always springs from a more

serious cause, and has an air of romantic tragedy. This had no grace of the kind. It was a poor shabby little

"O, don't call it so, Basil! I should like you to respect even a quarrel of ours more than that. It was tragical

enough with me, for I didn't see how it could ever be made up. I knew I couldn't make the advances. I don't

"Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get at is this: whether we shall love each other the more or the

less for it. I think we shall get on all the better for a while, on account of it. But I should have said it was

totally out of character it's something you might have expected of a very young bridal couple; but after what

"Very well," said Basil, who, having made all the concessions, could not enjoy the quarrel as she did, simply

In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness to that ride round the mountain, and shed a beneficent glow

upon the rest of their journey. The sun came out through the thin clouds, and lighted up the vast plain that

swept away north and east, with the purple heights against the eastern sky. The royal mountain lifted its

graceful mass beside them, and hid the city wholly from sight. Peasantvillages, in the shade of beautiful

elms, dotted the plain in every direction, and at intervals crept up to the side of the road along which they

drove. But these had been corrupted by a more ambitious architecture since Basil saw them last, and were no

longer purely French in appearance. Then, nearly every house was a tannery in a modest way, and poetically

published the fact by the display of a sheep's tail over the front door, like a bush at a wine shop. Now, if the

tanneries still existed, the poetry of the cheeps' tails had vanished from the portals. But our friends were

consoled by meeting numbers of the peasants jolting home from market in the painted carts, which are

doubtless of the pattern of the carts first built there two hundred years ago. They were grateful for the

immortal old wooden, crooked and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded in these vehicles; when

a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart, and showed the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasantmaid, they

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors of which they could see the

exquisite neatness of the life within. One of the doors opened into a schoolhouse, where they beheld with

rapture the schoolmistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head, and encircled by her flock

By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to put up the top of the barouche, they

entered a country church which had taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend with

silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft whisper of the shower without. There was no one

there but themselves. The urn of holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and no penitent knelt

at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one lighted lamp. The white roof swelled into dim arches over

their heads; the pale day like a visible hush stole through the painted windows; they heard themselves breathe

A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar, and a slender young priest appeared in a long black robe,

and with shaven head. He, too as he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence; and when he

approached with dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed courteously, it seemed impossible he should

speak. But he spoke, the pale young priest, the darkrobed tradition, the tonsured vision of an age and a

"A very little is more than my English," he said, yet he politely went the round of the pictures with them, and

gave them the names of the painters between his crossings at the different altars. At the high altar there was a

very fair Crucifixion; before this the priest bent one knee. "Fine picture, fine altar, fine church," he said in

English. At last they stopped next the poorbox. As their coins clinked against those within, he smiled

serenely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed, and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanished through

"Ah, my dear! what could have keen half so good as the nothing that did happen? Suppose we knew him to

have taken orders because of a disappointment in love: how common it would have made him; everybody has

been crossed in love once or twice." He bade the driver take them back to the hotel. "This is the very bouquet

of adventure why should we care for the grosser body? I dare say if we knew all about yonder pale young

At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses in guessing the nationality of the different persons, and in

wondering if the Canadians did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to outEnglish the English even

in the matter of paleale and sherry, and in rotundity of person and freshness of face, just as they emulated

them in the cut of their clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their health upon the health of the

Our friends began to detect something servile in it all, and but that they were such amiable persons, the

The loyalty, which had already appeared to them in the cathedral, suggested itself in many ways upon the

street, when they went out after dinner to do that little shopping which Isabel had planned to do in Montreal.

The booksellers' windows were full of Canadian editions of our authors, and English copies of English works,

instead of our pirated editions; the drygoods stores were gay with fabrics in the London taste and garments

of the London shape; here was the sign of a photographer to the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H. the

Prince of Wales; a barber was "under the patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E. the Duke of

Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal." 'Ich dien' was the motto of a restaurateur; a hosier had gallantly

labeled his stock in trade with 'Honi soit qui mal y pense'. Again they noted the English solidity of the civic

edifices, and already they had observed in the foreign population a difference from that at home. They saw no

German faces on the streets, and the Irish faces had not that truculence which they wear sometimes with us.

They had not lost their native simpleness and kindliness; the Irishmen who drove the public carriages were as

civil as our own Boston hackmen, and behaved as respectfully under the shadow of England here, as they

world have done under it in Ireland. The problem which vexes us seems to have been solved pleasantly

enough in Canada. Is it because the Celt cannot brook equality; and where he has not an established and

recognized caste above him, longs to trample on those about him; and if he cannot be lowest, will at least be

However, our friends did not suffer this or any other advantage of the colonial relation to divert them from

the opinion to which their observation was gradually bringing them,that its overweening loyalty placed a

great country like Canada in s very silly attitude, the attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, clinging to the

maternal skirts, and though spoilt and willful, without any character of his own. The constant reference of

local hopes to that remote centre beyond seas, the test of success by the criterions of a necessarily different

civilization, the social and intellectual dependence implied by traits that meet the most hurried glance in the

Dominion, give an effect of meanness to the whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of peace, of

irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks the grandeur which no sum of material prosperity can give; it is

ignoble, like all voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis in the New World,

It would be a pity, however, if it should be parted from the parent country merely to be joined to an

unsympathetic halfbrother like ourselves and nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from the Canadian

mind. There are some experiments no longer possible to us which could still be tried there to the advantage of

civilization, and we were better two great nations side by side than a union of discordant traditions and ideas.

But none the less does the American traveller, swelling with forgetfulness of the shabby despots who govern

New York, and the swindling railroad kings whose word is law to the whole land, feel like saying to the

hulling young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the Lakes, "Sever the apronstrings of allegiance, and try to be

Something of this sort Basil said, though of course not in apostrophic phrase, nor with Isabel's entire

concurrence, when he explained to her that it was to the colonial dependence of Canada she owed the ability

The fact is that the ladies' parlor at the hotel had been after dinner no better than a den of smugglers, in which

the fair contrabandists had debated the best means of evading the laws of their country. At heart every man is

a smuggler, and how much more every woman! She would have no scruple in ruining the silk and woolen

interest throughout the United States. She is a freetrader by intuitive perception of right, and is limited in

practice by nothing but fear of the statute. What could be taken into the States without detection, was the

subject before that wicked conclave; and next, what it would pay to buy in Canada. It seemed that silk

umbrellas were most eligible wares; and in the display of such purchases the parlor was given the appearance

of a violent thunderstorm. Gloves it was not advisable to get; they were better at home, as were many kinds

of fine woolen goods. But laces, which you could carry about you, were excellent; and so was any kind of

silk. Could it be carried if simply cut, and not made up? There was a difference about this: the friend of one

lady had taken home half a trunkful of cut silks; the friend of another had "run up the breadths" of one lone

little silk skirt, and then lost it by the rapacity of the customs officers. It was pretty much luck, and whether

the officers happened to be in goodhumor or not. You must not try to take in anything out of season,

however. One had heard of a Boston lady going home in July, who "had the furs taken off her back," in that

inclement month. Best get everything seasonable, and put it on at once. "And then, you know, if they ask you,

you can say it's been worn." To this black wisdom came the combined knowledge of those miscreants. Basil

could not repress a shudder at the innate depravity of the female heart. Here were virgins nurtured in the most

spotless purity of life, here were virtuous mothers of families, here were venerable matrons, patterns in

society and the church, smugglers to a woman, and eager for any guilty subterfuge! He glanced at Isabel to

see what effect the evil conversation had upon her. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed; all the woman was

on fire for smuggling. He sighed heavily and went out with her to do the little shopping.

Shall I follow them upon their excursion? Shopping in Montreal is very much what it is in Boston or New

York, I imagine, except that the clerks have a more honeyed sweetness of manners towards the ladies of our

nation, and are surprisingly generous constructionists of our revenue laws. Isabel had profited by every word

that she had heard in the ladies' parlor, and she would not venture upon unsafe ground; but her tender eyes

looked her unutterable longing to believe in the charming possibilities that the clerks suggested. She

bemoaned herself before the corded silks, which there was no time to have made up; the piecevelvets and

the linens smote her to the heart. But they also stimulated her invention, and she bought and bought of the

madeup wares in real or fancied needs, till Basil represented that neither their purses nor their trunks could

stand any more. "O, don't be troubled about the trunks, dearest," she cried, with that gayety which nothing but

shopping can kindle in a woman's heart; while he faltered on from counter to counter, wondering at which he

should finally swoon from fatigue. At last, after she had declared repeatedly, "There, now, I am done," she

Basil parted with her at the door. He was a man of high principle himself, and that scene in the smugglers'

den, and his wife's preparation for transgression, were revelations for which nothing could have consoled him

but a paragon umbrella for five dollars, and an excellent business suit of Scotch goods for twenty.

When some hours later he sat with Isabel on the forward promenade of the steamboat for Quebec, and

summed up the profits of their shopping, they were both in the kindliest mood towards the poor Canadians,

For miles the water front of Montreal is superbly faced with quays and locks of solid stone masonry, and thus

she is clean and beautiful to the very feet. Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foul old tumbledown

warehouses that dishonor the waterside in most cities, rise from the broad wharves; behind these spring the

twin towers of Notre Dame, and the steeples of the other churches above the city roofs.

It's noble, yes, it's noble, after the best that Europe can show," said Isabel, with enthusiasm; "and what a

pleasant day we've had here! Doesn't even our quarrel show 'couleur de rose' in this light?"

"Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset on it at the head of the street there."

The affect was so fine that Isabel could not be angry with him for failing to heed what she had said, and she

"It seems rather farfetched," she said presently, "to erect a monument to Nelson in Montreal, doesn't it? But

then, it's a very absurd monument when you're near it," she added, thoughtfully.

Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this Nelson column in Jacques Cartier Square, his thoughts

wandered away, not to the hero of the Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navigator, the first white man who

ever set foot upon that shore, and who more than three hundred years ago explored the St. Lawrence as far as

Montreal, and in the splendid autumn weather climbed to the top of her green height and named it. The scene

that Jacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirage of the fast projected upon the present, floated before him, and

he saw at the mountain's foot the Indian city of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous lodges of bark, its

encircling palisades, and its wide outlying fields of yellow maize. He heard with Jacques Cartier's sense the

blare of his followers' trumpets down in the open square of the barbarous city, where the soldiers of many an

OldWorld fight, "with mustached lip and bearded chin, with arquebuse and glittering halberd, helmet, and

cuirass," moved among the plumed and painted savages; then he lifted Jacques Cartier's eyes, and looked out

upon the magnificent landscape. "East, wept, and north, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue

ribbon of the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds of Mexico, stretched a

leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry, the mighty battleground of late; centuries, lay sunk in savage

A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westward route to China and the East, some three quarters of

a century later, had fixed the first tradingpost at Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the convent of

the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him, and vanished with all its fleets of furtraders' boats and

hunters' birch canoes, and the watch fires of both; and then in the sweet light of the spring morning, he saw

Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green meadows, that spread all gay with early flowers where

Hochelaga once stood, and with the blackrobed Jesuits, the highborn, delicately nurtured, and devoted

nuns, and the steelclad soldiers of his train, kneeling about the altar raised there in the wilderness, and silent

He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel, using the colors of the historian who has made these scenes the

beautiful inheritance of all dream era, and sketched the battles, the miracles, the sufferings, and the penances

through which the pious colony was preserved and prospered, till they both grew impatient of modern

"Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing in midwinter to the top of the mountain there, under a heavy cross

set with the bones of saints, and planting it on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow to do so if Villemarie were

saved from the freshet; and then of Madame de la Peltrie romantically receiving the sacrament there, while all

Villemarie fell down adoring! Ah, that was a picturesque people! When did ever a Boston governor climb to

the top of Beacon hill in fulfillment of a vow? To be sure, we may yet see a New York governor doing

something of the kind if he can find a hill. But this ridiculous column to Nelson, who never had anything

to do with Montreal," he continued; it really seems to me the perfect expression of snobbish colonial

dependence and sentimentality, seeking always to identify itself with the mother country, and ignoring the

local past and its heroic figures. A column to Nelson in Jacques Cartier Square, on the ground that was

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. During supper they were served by French waiters, who, without

apparent English of their own, miraculously understood that of the passengers, except in the case of the

furious gentleman who wanted English breakfast tea; to so much English as that their inspiration did not

reach, and they forced him to compromise on coffee. It was a French boat, owned by a French company, and

seemed to be officered by Frenchmen throughout; certainly, as our tourists in the joy of their good appetites

The boat was almost as large as those of the Hudson, but it was not so lavishly splendid, though it had

everything that could minister to the comfort and selfrespect of the passengers. These were of all nations,

but chiefly Americans, with some French Canadians. The former gathered on the forward promenade,

enjoying what little of the landscape the growing night left visible, and the latter made society after their

manner in the saloon. They were plainlooking men and women, mostly, and provincial, it was evident, to

their inmost hearts; provincial in origin, provincial by inheritance, by all their circumstances, social and

political. Their relation with France was not a proud one, but it was not like submersion by the slipslop of

English colonial loyalty; yet they seem to be troubled by no memories of their hundred years' dominion of the

land that they rescued from, the wilderness, and that was wrested from them by war. It is a strange fate for

any people thus to have been cut off from the parentcountry, and abandoned to whatever destiny their

conquerors chose to reserve for them; and if each of the race wore the sadness and strangeness of that fate in

his countenance it would not be wonderful. Perhaps it is wonderful that none of them shows anything of the

kind. In their desertion they have multiplied and prospered; they may have a national grief, but they hide it

Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the person of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had shown her

and Basil the pictures in the country church. She was confessing to the priest, and she was not at all surprised

to find that he was Basil in a suit of medieval armor. He had an immense cross on his shoulder.

"To get this cross to the top of the mountain," thought Isabel," we must have two horses. Basil," she added,

"Ten, if you like, my dear," answered his voice, cheerfully, "though I think we'd better ride up in the

We're in sight of Quebec," he said. "Come out as soon as you can,come out into the seventeenth century."

Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, where all the other passengers seemed to be assembled, and

beheld a vast bulk of gray and purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up from the mists of the river, and

taking the early morning light warm upon its face and crown. Black hulked, redillumined Liverpool

steamers, gay rivercraft and ships of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries sped

their swift trafficladen shuttles; a lower town hung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populous and

picturesque, up its sides; from the massive citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, and along

its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and

Slowly out of our workday, businesssuited, modern world the vessel steamed up to this city of an olden

time and another ideal,to her who was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still,

after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal past from which she

sprung. Upon her height she sits unique; and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a

sense of medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad square, a market beside which the

Bonsecours Market would have shown as common as the Quincy, and up the odd woodensidewalked street

stretched an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec what the gondolas are to

Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were

going to the dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be thought of without a pang. It

is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through which they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since

the summer of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec horses which expect

to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they turned a corner of the towering weedgrown rock, and

shot in under the low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways for the foot passengers. The gloomy

masonry dripped with damp, the doors were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust

endwise into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against passing wheels. Why did not some

semiforbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand

their passports? The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch. How often in the adored Old

World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning hour! On

"Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they'd soon rattle this old wall down and let in a little fresh

air!" said a patriotic voice at Isabel's elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow irregular streets, the

huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under which they drove on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square, "Here is the French Cathedral; there is the Upper Town Market;

yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!" cried Basil; and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side

of the square, and a low, massive yellow building at the other, and, between the two, long ranks of carts, and

fruit and vegetable stands, protected by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas. Then they dashed round the

corner of a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The low ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy

woodwork, the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the desired character of age, and its slovenly state

bestowed an additional charm. In another place they might have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they

would almost have resented it. By a chance they had the best room in the house, but they held it only till

certain people who had engaged it by telegraph should arrive in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool;

and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The house was very full, and the Ellisons

(who had come on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less state only on like conditions.

The travellers all met at breakfast, which was admirably cooked, and well served, with the attendance of

those swarms of flies which infest Quebec. and especially infested the old Musty House, in summer. It had,

of course, the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which the traveller breakfasts every day as long as he

remains in Lower Canada; and it represented the abundance of wild berries in the Quebec market; and it was

There were not many other Americans besides themselves at this hotel, which seemed, indeed, to be kept

open to oblige such travellers as had been there before, and could not persuade themselves to try the new

Hotel St. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted. Most of the faces our tourists saw were English

or EnglishCanadian, and the young people from Omaha; who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in

harmony with the place. They appeared to be a bridal party, but which of the two sisters, in buff linen 'clad

from head to foot' was the bride, never became known. Both were equally free with the husband, and he was

For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see the city in company with Miss Ellison; but it was only a

passing weakness. She remembered directly the coolness between friends which she had seen caused by

objects of interest in Europe, and she wisely deferred a more intimate acquaintance till it could have a purely

social basis. After all, nothing is so tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy or so apt to end in mutual

dislike,except gratitude. So the ladies parted friends till dinner, and drove off in separate carriages.

As in other show cities, there is a routine at Quebec for travellers who come on Saturday and go on Monday,

and few depart from it. Our friends necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. It was raining one of those

cold rains by which the scarcebanished winter reminds the Canadian fields of his nearness even in

midsummer, though between the bitter showers the air was sultry and close; and it was just the light in which

to see the grim strength of the fortress next strongest to Gibraltar in the world. They passed a heavy iron

gateway, and up through a winding lane of masonry to the gate of the citadel, where they were delivered into

the care of Private Joseph Drakes, who was to show them such parts of the place as are open to curiosity. But,

a citadel which has never stood a siege, or been threatened by any danger more serious than Fenianism, soon

becomes, however strong, but a dull piece of masonry to the civilian; and our tourists more rejoiced in the

crumbling fragment of the old French wall which the English destroyed than in all they had built; and they

valued the latter work chiefly for the glorious prospects of the St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it

commanded. Advanced into the centre of an amphitheatre inconceivably vast, that enormous beak of rock

overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and then, in every direction, immeasurable stretches of gardened

vale, and wooded upland, till all melts into the purple of the encircling mountains. Far and near are lovely

white villages nestling under elms, in the heart of fields and meadows; and everywhere the long, narrow,

accurately divided farms stretch downward to the rivershores. The best roads on the continent make this

beauty and richness accessible; each little village boasts some natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract:

and this landscape, magnificent beyond any in eastern America, is historical and interesting beyond all others.

Hither came Jacques Cartier three hundred and fifty years ago, and wintered on the low point there by the St.

Charles; here, nearly a century after, but still fourteen years before the landing at Plymouth, Champlain

founded the missionary city of Quebec; round this rocky beak came sailing the halfpiratical armament of the

Calvinist Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebec in the interest of the English, holding it three years; in the Lower

Town, yonder, first landed the coldly welcomed Jesuits, who came with the returning French and made

Quebec forever eloquent of their zeal, their guile, their heroism; at the foot of this rock lay the fleet of Sir

William Phipps, governor of Massachusetts, and vainly assailed it in 1698; in 1759 came Wolfe and

embattled all the region, on river and land, till at last the bravely defended city fell into his dying hand on the

Plains of Abraham; here Montgomery laid down his life at the head of the boldest and most hopeless effort of

Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an enemy expecting drink money, pointed out the sign, board

on the face of the crag commemorating 'Montgomery's death'; and then showed them the officers' quarters

and those of the common soldiers, not far from which was a line of hangdog fellows drawn up to receive

sentence for divers small misdemeanors, from an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dundrearily from his

fresh English cheeks. There was that immense difference between him and the men in physical grandeur and

beauty, which is so notable in the aristocratically ordered military services of Europe, and which makes the

rank seem of another race from the file. Private Drakes saluted his superior, and visibly deteriorated in his

presence, though his breast was covered with medals, and he had fought England's battles in every part of the

world. It was a gross injustice, the triumph of a thousand years of wrong; and it was touching to have Private

Drakes say that he expected in three months to begin life for himself, after twenty years' service of the Queen;

and did they think he could get anything to do in the States? He scarcely knew what he was fit for, but he

thoughtto so little in him came the victories he had helped to win in the Crimea, in China, and in

Indiathat he coald take care of a gentleman's horse and work about his place. He looked inquiringly at

Basil, as if he might be a gentleman with a horse to be taken care of and a place to be worked about, and

made him regret that he was not a man of substance enough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs. Drakes

and the brood of Ducklings, who had been shown to him stowed away in one of those cavernous rooms in the

earthworks where the married soldiers have their quarters. His regret enriched the reward of Private Drakes'

service,which perhaps answered one of Private Drakes' purposes, if not his chief aim. He promised to

come to the States upon the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking from her own large experience, declared

that everybody got on there, and he bade our friends an affectionate farewell as they drove away to the

The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading northward to the

old battleground and beyond it; but, these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, and

lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from the highway; so that the visitor may

uninterruptedly meditate whatever emotion he will for the scene of Wolfe's death as he rides along. His

loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who must always stand forth in history a figure

of beautiful and singular distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness,

and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear. The

whole story of the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall was a triumph for all

the Englishspeaking race, and to us Americans, long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her

walls or sustained by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringing bells and blazing bonfires

throughout the Colonies; yet now we cannot think without pity of the hopes extinguished and the labors

brought to naught in her overthrow. That strange colony of priests and soldiers, of martyrs and heroes, of

which she was the capital, willing to perish for an allegiance to which the mothercountry was indifferent,

and fighting against the armies with which England was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian

population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting

than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly

victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would "rather have written than beat the French

tomorrow;" but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time

was, "So much the better; then I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec."

In the city for which they perished their fame has never been divided. The English have shown themselves

very generous victors; perhaps nothing could be alleged against them, but that they were victors. A shaft

common to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in the Governor's Garden; and in the Chapel of the

Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalm died, by the same conquerors who raised to Wolfe's

A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe

breathed his last, on ground lower than the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the

fire of the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient, and the simple inscription, "Here died Wolfe

victorious," gives it a dignity which many cubits of added stature could not bestow. Another of those bitter

showers, which had interspersed the morning's sunshine, drove suddenly across the open plain, and our

tourists comfortably sentimentalized the scene behind the closedrawn curtains of their carriage. Here a

whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded Isabel; and she said, "Only think of it!" and looked to a

wandering fold of her skirt, upon which the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.

Do I pitch the pipe too low? We poor honest men are at a sad disadvantage; and now and then I am minded to

give a loose to fancy, and attribute something really grand and fine to my people, in order to make them

worthier the reader's respected acquaintance. But again, I forbid myself in a higher interest; and I am afraid

that even if I were less virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a battlefield; for of all things of the past a

battle is the least conceivable. I have heard men who fought in many battles say that the recollection was like

a dream to them; and what can the merely civilian imagination do on the Plains of Abraham, with the fact that

there, more than a century ago, certain thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a bright September morning,

to kill and maim as many Englishmen? This ground, so green and oft with grass beneath the feet, was it once

torn with shot and soaked with the blood of men? Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain,

for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea were to ache and break? Did the wretches that fell wounded

stretch themselves here, and writhe beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelter into little

hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul was so full of noble and sublime impulses,

die here, shot through like some ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din of arms,

the cries of victory,I vainly strive to conjure up some image of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible

spectre! that, fill the world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its moments of sanity

and peace. Least credible art thou on the old battlefields, where the mother of the race denies thee with

breeze and sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass! The red stain in Basil's thought yielded to the rain

sweeping across the pastureland from which it had long since faded, and the words on the monument, "Here

died Wolfe victorious," did not proclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but his selfconquest, his

victory over fear and pain and love of life. Alas! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor those who

renounce self in the joy of their kind, equally with those who devote themselves through the anguish and loss

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment, which was at the Hotel Dieu whither they

went after returning from the battlefield. It took all the maladdress of which travellers are masters to secure

admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong bells, and misunderstood many soft nunvoices

speaking French through grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual services, that

they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered in English that the porter would ask if they might

see the chapel. They hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who perished long

ago for the conversion of a race that has perished, and whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of

Parkman, with some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister with a pale, kind face led

them through a ward of the hospital into the chapel, which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely

neat and cool, but lacking the martyr's skull. They asked if it were not to be seen. "Ah, yes, poor Pere

Brebeuf!" sighed the gentle sister, with the tone and manner of having lost him yesterday; "we had it down

only last week, showing it to some Jesuit fathers; but it's in the convent now, and isn't to be seen." And there

mingled apparently in her regret for Pere Brebeuf a confusing sense of his actual state as a portable piece of

furniture. She would not let them praise the chapel. It was very clean, yes, but there was nothing to see in it.

She deprecated their compliments with many shrugs, but she was pleased; for when we renounce the pomps

and vanities of this world, we are pretty sure to find them in some other, if we are women. She, good and

pure soul, whose whole life was given to selfdenying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in her

manner, a spiritualworldliness which was the clarified likeness of this worldliness. O, had they seen the

Hotel Dieu at Montreal? Then (with a vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care to look at this, which

by comparison was nothing. Yet she invited them to go through the wards if they would, and was clearly

proud to have them see the wonderful cleanness and comfort of the place. There were not many patients, but

here and there a wan or fevered face looked at them from its pillow, or a weak form drooped beside a bed, or

a group of convalescents softly talked together. They came presently to the last hall, at the end of which sat

another nun, beside a window that gave a view of the busy port, and beyond it the landscape of villagelit

plain and forestdarkened height. On a table at her elbow stood a rosetree, on which hung two only pale

tearoses, so fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wonder and praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun, to

whom there had been some sort of presentation, gathered one of the roses, and with a shy grace offered it to

Isabel, who shrank back a little as from too costly a gift. "Take it," said the first nun, with her pretty French

accent; while the other, who spoke no English at all, beamed a placid smile; and Isabel took it. The flower,

lying light in her palm, exhaled a delicate odor, and a thrill of exquisite compassion for it trembled through

her heart, as if it had been the white, cloistered life of the silent nun: with its pallid loveliness, it was as a

flower that had taken the veil. It could never have uttered the burning passion of a lover for his mistress; the

nightingale could have found no thorn on it to press his aching poet's heart against; but sick and weary eyes

had dwelt gratefully upon it; at most it might have expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless love of some

favorite saint in paradise. Cold, and pale, and sweet,was it indeed only a flower, this cloistered rose of the

"Breathe it," said the gentle Gray Sister; "sometimes the air of the hospital offends. Not us, no; we are used;

but you come from the outside." And she gave her rose for this humble use as lovingly as she devoted herself

"It is very little to see," she said at the end; "but if you are pleased, I am very glad. Goodby, goodby! "She

stood with her arms folded, and watched them out of sight with her kind, coquettish little smile, and then the

From Hotel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a step; both were in the same street; but our friends fancied

themselves to have come an immense distance when they sat down at an early dinner, amidst the clash of

crockery and cutlery, and looked round upon all the profane travelling world assembled. Their regard

presently fixed upon one company which monopolized a whole table, and were defined from the other diners

by peculiarities as marked as those of the Soeurs Grises themselves. There were only two men among some

eight or ten women; one of the former had a bad amiable face, with eyes full of a merry deviltry; the other,

clean. shaven, and dark, was demure and silent as a priest. The ladies were of various types, but of one effect,

with large rolling eyes, and faces that somehow regarded the beholder as from a distance, and with an

impartial feeling for him as for an element of publicity. One of them, who caressed a lapdog with one hand

while she served herself with the other, was, as she seemed to believe, a blonde; she had pale blue eyes, and

her hair was cut in front so as to cover her forehead with a straggling sandycolored fringe. She had an

English look, and three or four others, with dark complexion and black, unsteady eyes, and various abandon

of backhair, looked like Cockney houris of Jewish blood; while two of the lovely company were clearly of

our own nation, as was the young man with the reckless laughing face. The ladies were dressed and jeweled

with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary style of society what scenepainting is to

painting, and might have borne close inspection no better. They seemed the besthumored people in the

world, and on the kindliest terms with each other. The waiters shared their pleasant mood, and served them

affectionately, and were now and then invited to join in the gay talk which babbled on over dislocated

aspirates, and filled the air with a sentiment of vagabond enjoyment, of the romantic freedom of violated

If they had needed explanation it would have been given by the announcement in the office of the hotel that a

After dinner they took possession of the parlor, and while one strummed fitfully upon the ailing hotel piano,

the rest talked, and talked shop, of course, as all of us do when several of a trade are got together.

"W'at," said the eldest of the darkfaced, black haired British blondes of Jewish race,"w'at are we going to

"We're going to give 'Pygmalion,' at Montrehal," answered the British blonde of American birth,

"But we cahn't, you know," said the lady with the fringed forehead; "Hagnes is gone on to New York, and

There was an outcry at this, and "'Ow ever would she get herself up for 'Venus?" and "W'at a guy she'll look!"

and "Nonsense! Bella's too 'eavy for Venus!" came from different lively critics; and the debate threatened to

become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their gentlemen came in and said, "Charley don't seem so

well this afternoon." On this the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, "Poor Charley, let 's go and

cheer 'im hop a bit," the whole goodtempered company trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of aimless wandering to and fro about the

streets which seizes a foreign city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness. So they went out and

took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened

by Montreal, and impartially rejoiced in the crooked upanddown hill streets; the thoroughly French

domestic architecture of a place that thus denied having been English for a hundred years; the portecocheres

beside every house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls; the roughpaved,

rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the universal dormerwindows; the littleness of the private

houses, and the greatness of the highwalled and gardengirdled convents; the breadths of weatherstained

city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loopholes of

masonry, and the redcoated sergeants flirting with nurserymaids upon the carriages, while the children

tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell; the sloping marketplace before the cathedral, where yet

some remnant of the morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquet of

marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enough to have sold it in any marketplace of Europe; the

small, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by English retail trade; the movement of all the strange figures

of cleric and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English; the encounter of

other tourists, the passage back and forth through the different city gates; the public wooden stairways,

dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and

shipping and seafaring life huddled close in under the hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as

black and ruinous as the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recollets

They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired the Le Brun, and the other

paintings of less merit, but equal interest through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of

paintings; and then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at the Crucifixion by

Vandyck which is there, as in reveling amid the familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering

statue of a saint, every ropedancing angel, every cherub of those that on the carven and gilded clouds above

was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a feather brush, and giving each shrine

a businesslike nod as he passed, was as a longlost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for the

young girls and old women who stepped in for a halfhour's devotion, and for the men with bourgeois or

peasant faces, who stole a moment from affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints. There was nothing in the

place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that of a thousand other churches of the

eighteenth century. They could easily have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two

great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the entrance, and that too vividly reminded

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the South and North, and one never quite

reconciles himself to them. The Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land, and

ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of home in so many things, that it goes to the

heart with a painful emotion to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder some

characteristic aspect of Quebec,a bit of street with heavy stone houses opening upon a stretch of the city

wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising slim against it,you say, to your satisfied soul, "Yes, it is the real

thing!" and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere

picture. The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is

not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings

which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow, from

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular garden near Durham Terrace, where every

brightness of fall flowers abounded, marigold, coxcomb, snapdragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and sunflower. It

was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied that fainter hearted plants would have pined

away in that garden, where the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again with a musical

shiver. The consciousness of this latent cold, of winter only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not

deeper even in the once magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where there was actually a rawness

in the late afternoon air, and whither they were strolling for the view from its height, and to pay their duty to

the obelisk raised there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The sounding Latin inscription

celebrates the royal governorgeneral who erected it almost as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but

these spectators did not begrudge the space given to his praise, for so fine a thought merited praise. It

enforced again the idea of a kind posthumous friendship between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gives their

memory its rare distinction, and unites them, who fell in fight against each other, as closely as if they had

Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the city that has once been a capital; and this odor of fallen

nobility belongs to Quebec, which was a capital in the European sense, with all the advantages of a small

vice regal court, and its social and political intrigues, in the French times. Under the English, for a hundred

years it was the centre of Colonial civilization and refinement, with a governorgeneral's residence and a

brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to which the large garrison of former days gave gayety and romance.

The honors of a capital, first shared with Montreal and Toronto, now rest with halfsavage Ottawa; and the

garrison has dwindled to a regiment of rifles, whose presence would hardly be known, but for the natty

sergeants lounging, stick in hand, about the streets and courting the nursemaids. But in the days of old there

were scenes of carnival pleasure in the Governor's Garden, and there the garrison band still plays once a

week, when it is filled by the fashion and beauty of Quebec, and some semblance of the past is recalled. It is

otherwise a lonesome, indifferently tended place, and on this afternoon there was no one there but a few

loafing young fellows of low degree, French and English, and children that played screaming from seat to

seat and path to path and over the tooheavily shaded grass. In spite of a conspicuous warning that any dog

entering the garden would be destroyed, the place was thronged with dogs unmolested and apparently in no

danger of the threatened doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation was given in the legend rudely carved

The morning of the next day our tourists gave to hearing mass at the French cathedral, which was not

different, to their heretical senses, from any other mass, except that the ceremony was performed with a very

full clerical force, and was attended by an uncommonly devout congregation. With Europe constantly in their

minds, they were bewildered to find the worshippers not chiefly old and young women, but men also of all

ages and of every degree, from the neat peasant in his Sabbathday best to the modish young Quebecker,

who spread his handkerchief on the floor to save his pantaloons during supplication. There was fashion and

education in large degree among the men, and there was in all a pious attention to the function in poetical

keeping with the origin and history of a city which the zeal of the Church had founded.

A magnificent beadle, clothed in a goldlaced coat aid bearing a silver staff, bowed to them when they

entered, and, leading them to a pew, punched up a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed his prayers in the

aisle outside, while they took his place. It appeared to Isabel very unjust that their curiosity should displace

his religion; but she consoled herself by making Basil give a shilling to the man who, preceded by the shining

beadle, came round to take up a collection. The peasant could have given nothing but copper, and she felt that

this restored the lost balance of righteousness in their favor. There was a sermon, very sweetly and gracefully

delivered by a young priest of singular beauty, even among clergy whose good looks are so notable as those

of Quebec; and then they followed the orderly crowd of worshippers out, and left the cathedral to the

They thought the type of FrenchCanadian better here than at Montreal, and they particularly noticed the

greater number of pretty young girls. All classes were well dressed; for though the best dressed could not be

called stylish according to the American standard, as Isabel decided, and had only a provincial gentility, the

poorest wore garments that were clean and whole. Everybody, too, was going to have a hot Sunday dinner, if

there was any truth in the odors that steamed out of every door and window; and this dinner was to be

abundantly garnished with onions, for the dullest nose could not err concerning that savor.

Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed itself superior to every distinction of race, were strolling

vaguely and not always quite happily about; but they made no impression on the proper local character, and

the air throughout the morning was full of the sentiment of Sunday in a Catholic city. There was the

apparently meaningless jangling of bells, with profound hushes between, and then more jubilant jangling, and

then deeper silence; there was the devout trooping of the crowds to the churches; and there was the beginning

of the long afternoon's lounging and amusement with which the people of that faith reward their morning's

devotion. Little stands for the sale of knotty apples and chokecherries and cakes and cider sprang magically

into existence after service, and people were already eating and drinking at them. The carriagedrivers

resumed their chase of the tourists, and the unvoiceful stir of the new week had begun again. Quebec, in fact,

is but a pantomimic reproduction of France; it is as if two centuries in a new land, amidst the primeval

silences of nature and the long hush of the Northern winters, had stilled the tongues of the lively folk and

made them taciturn as we of a graver race. They have kept the ancestral vivacity of manner; the elegance of

the shrug is intact; the talking hands take part in dialogue; the agitated person will have its share of

expression. But the loud and eager tone is wanting, and their dumb show mystifies the beholder almost as

much as the Southern architecture under the slanting Northern sun. It is not America; if it is not France, what

Of the many beautiful things to see in the neighborhood of Quebec, our weddingjourneyers were in doubt

on which to bestow their one precious afternoon. Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and its remnant of

bleached and fading Hurons, or the Isle of Orleans with its fertile farms and its primitive peasant life, or

Montmorenci, with the unrivaled fall and the long drive through the beautiful village of Beauport? Isabel

chose the last, because Basil had been there before, and it had to it the poetry of the wasted years in which

she did not know him. She had possessed herself of the journal of his early travels, among the other portions

and parcels recoverable from the dreadful past, and from time to time on this journey she had read him

passages out of it, with mingled sentiment and irony, and, whether she was mocking or admiring, equally to

his confusion. Now, as they smoothly bowled away from the city, she made him listen to what he had written

It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment about the village and the rural sights, and especially a girl

tossing hay in the field. Yet it had touches of nature and reality, and Basil could not utterly despise himself

for having written it. "Yes," he said, "life was then a thing to be put into pretty periods; now it's something

There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his tone, that made her sigh, "Ah! if I'd only had a little more

money, you might have devoted yourself to literature;" for she was a true Bostonian in her honor of our poor

"O, you're not greatly to blame," answered her husband, "and I forgive you the little wrong you've done me. I

was quits with the Muse, at any rate, you know, before we were married; and I'm very well satisfied to be

Tomorrow? The word struck cold upon her. Then their wedding journey would begin to end tomorrow! So

"There, ma'am," said the driver, rising from his seat and facing round, while he pointed with his whip towards

They looked back with him at the city, whose thousands of tinned roofs, rising one above the other from the

water's edge to the citadel, were all a splendor of argent light in the afternoon sun. It was indeed as if some

magic had clothed that huge rock, base and steepy flank and crest, with a silver city. They gazed upon the

marvel with cries of joy that satisfied the driver's utmost pride in it, and Isabel said, "To live there, there in

that Silver City, in perpetual sojourn! To be always going to go on a morrow that never came! To be forever

From far down the river by which they rode came the sound of a cannon, breaking the Sabbath repose of the

air. "That's the gun of the Liverpool steamer, just coming in," said the driver.

"O," cried Isabel, "I'm thankful we're only to stay one night more, for now we shall be turned out of our nice

There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrence from Quebec, almost to Montmorenci; and they met

crowds of villagers coming from the church as they passed through Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at the

change that had befallen them. They had their Sunday's best on, and the women, instead of wearing the

peasant costume in which he had first seen them, were now dressed as if out of "Harper's Bazar" of the year

before. He anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw hats and the bright sacks and kirtles were no more.

"O, you'd see them on weekdays, sir," was the answer, "but they're not so plenty any time as they used to be."

He opened his store of facts about the habitans, whom he praised for every virtue, for thrift, for sobriety,

for neatness, for amiability; and his words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish

race, between which and the Canadians there is no kindness lost. But the looks of the passersby

corroborated him, and as for the little houses, opendoored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window

and portal, they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness. From each the owner's slim domain,

narrowing at every successive division among the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river in

welldefined lines, and beside the cottage is a garden of potherbs, bordered with a flame of bright autumn

flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion grunts the fattening pig, which is to enrich all those peas and onions

for the winter's broth; there is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I dare be sworn there is always a

small girl driving a flock of decorous ducks down the middle of the street; and of the priest with a book under

his arm, passing a wayside shrine, what possible doubt? The houses, which are of one model, are built by

the peasants themselves with the stone which their land yields more abundantly than any other crop, and are

furnished with galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the fleeting summer, and perhaps to remember the

longlost ancestral summers of Normandy. At every moment, in passing through this ideally neat and pretty

village, our tourists must think of the lovely poem of which all French Canada seems but a reminiscence and

illustration. It was Grand Pre, not Beauport; and they paid an eager homage to the beautiful genius which has

touched those simple village aspects with an undying charm, and which, whatever the land's political

The village, stretching along the broad interval of the St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you draw near the Falls

of Montmorenci, and presently you drive past the grove shutting from the road the countryhouse in which

the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and come in sight of two lofty towers of

Once a suspensionbridge, built sorely against the will of the neighboring habitans, hung from these towers

high over the long plunge of the cataract. But one morning of the fatal spring after the first winter's frost had

tried the hold of the cable on the rocks, an old peasant and his wife with their little grandson set out in their

cart to pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoring wires suddenly lost their grip upon the

shore, and whirled into the air; the bridge crashed under the hapless passengers and they were launched from

its height, upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged, two hundred and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss.

The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon low stone piers, so far up the river from the cataract that

whoever fell from it would yet have many a chance for life; and it would have been perilous to offer to

replace the fallen structure, which, in the belief of faithful Christians, clearly belonged to the numerous

bridges built by the Devil, in times when the Devil did not call himself a civil engineer.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad tale as he halted his horses on the bridge; and as his

passengers looked down the rockfretted brown torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudder

that ever she had set foot on that suspensionbridge below Niagara, and to prove to Basil's confusion that her

doubt of the bridges between the Three Sisters was not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdom concerning

From the gate opening into the grounds about the fall two or three little French boys, whom they had not the

heart to forbid, ran noisily before them with cries in their sole English, "This way, sir" and led toward a

weatherbeaten summerhouse that tottered upon a projecting rock above the verge of the cataract. But our

tourists shook their heads, and turned away for a more distant and less dizzy enjoyment of the spectacle,

though any commanding point was sufficiently chasmal and precipitous. The lofty bluff was scooped inward

from the St. Lawrence in a vast irregular semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one within another, sinking far

into its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or meagrely wooded here and there with evergreen. From the

central brink of these gloomy purple chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a cloud,

I say a cloud, because I find it already said to my hand, as it were, in a pretty verse, and because I must needs

liken Montmorenci to something that is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent the glinting of the water

in its downward swoop; it is like some broad slope of sun smitten snow; but snow is coldly white and

opaque, and this has a creamy warmth in its luminous mass; and so, there hangs the cataract unsaid as before.

It is a mystery that anything so grand should be so lovely, that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect

should yet be so large that one glance fails to comprehend it all. The rugged wildness of the cliffs and

hollows about it is softened by its gracious beauty, which half redeems the vulgarity of the timbermerchant's

uses in setting the river at work in his sawmills and choking its outlet into the St. Lawrence with rafts of

lumber and rubbish of slabs and shingles. Nay, rather, it is alone amidst these things, and the eye takes note

Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept with its white clover to the edge of the precipice, and gazed

dreamily upon the fall, filling their vision with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser than I, they did not

try to utter its loveliness; they were content to feel it, and the perfection of the afternoon, whose low sun

slanting over the landscape gave, under that pale, greenishblue sky, a pensive sentiment of autumn to the

world. The crickets cried amongst the grass; the hesitating chirp of birds came from the tree overhead; a

shaggy colt left off grazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them; their little guides, having found that

these people had no pleasure in the sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a precipice, threw themselves

also down upon the grass and crooned a long, long ballad in a mournful minor key about some maiden whose

name was La Belle Adeline. It was a moment of unmixed enjoyment for every sense, and through all their

being they were glad; which considering, they ceased to be so, with a deep sigh, as one reasoning that he

dreams must presently awake. They never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it; but perhaps

their rapture would have ceased as swiftly, even if they had not tried to make it a fact of consciousness.

"If there were not dinner after such experiences as these," said Isabel, as they sat at table that evening, "I don't

know what would become of one. But dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty, and brings you gently back

to earth. You must eat, don't you see, and there's nothing disgraceful about what you're obliged to do; and

"Isabel, Isabel," cried her husband, "you have a wonderful mind, and its workings always amaze me. But be

careful, my dear; be careful. Don't work it too hard. The human brain, you know: delicate organ."

"Well, you understand what I mean; and I think it's one of the great charms of a husband, that you're not

forced to express yourself to him. A husband," continued Isabel, sententiously, poising a bit of meringue

between her thumb and finger,for they had reached that point in the repast, "a husband is almost as good as

In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and exchanged the history of the day with them.

"Certainly," said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, "it's been a pleasant day enough, but what of the night? You've

been turned out, too, by those people who came on the steamer, and who might as well have stayed on board

"Not precisely," said Isabel; "we have a coop in the fifth story, right under the roof."

Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her husband and cried in tones of reproach, "Richard, Mrs. March has

"A coop, she said," retorted that amiable Colonel, "and we're too good for that. The clerk is keeping us in

suspense about a room, because he means to surprise us with something palatial at the end. It 's his joking

"I have made life a burden to him for the last halfhour," returned the Colonel, with the kindliest smile.

"O Richard," cried his wife, in despair of his amendment, "you wouldn't make life a burden to a mouse!" And

"Well, Fanny," the Colonel irrelevantly answered, put on your hat and things, and let's all go up to Durham

Terrace for a promenade. I know our friends want to go. It's something worth seeing; and by the time we get

Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sundaynight

promenading on Durham Terrace. This is the ample space on the brow of the cliff to the left of the citadel, the

noblest and most commanding position in the whole city, which was formerly occupied by the old castle of

Saint Louis, where dwelt the brave Count Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime. The

castle went the way of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord Durham leveled the site and made it a

public promenade. A stately arcade of solid masonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and an iron parapet

incloses it; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and some idle old guns for the children to clamber over and

play with. A soft twilight had followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a willing

eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring into more romantic relief the citadel dark

against the mellow evening, and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets of

the Lower Town. The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there was a constant coming and going of the

promenaders, who each formally paced back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went

quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all French, and they were not generally, it

seemed, of the first fashion, but rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented only by a

few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman with an Indian scarf trailing from his hat.

There were some fair American costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially Quebecian. The

young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers, had the true touch of provincial unstylishness, the young

men the ineffectual excess of the secondrate Latin dandy, their elders the rich inelegance of a bourgeoisie in

their best. A few, betterfigured avocats or notaires (their profession was as unmistakable as if they had

carried their well polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and gravely talked with each other.

The nonAmerican character of the scene was not less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed

according to his own taste and frankly indulged private preferences in shapes and colors. One of the

promenaders was in white, even to his canvas shoes; another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared in

perfect purple. It had a strange, almost portentous effect when these two startling figures met as friends and

joined each other in the promenade with linked arms; but the evening was already beginning to darken round

them, and presently the purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside the glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the river defined itself by the varicolored lights of the ships

and steamers that lay, dark, motionless bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewis swarmed upon

the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering

roofs and lamplit windows and dark and shining streets around the mighty rock, mural crowned. Suddenly a

spectacle peculiarly Northern and characteristic of Quebec revealed itself; a long arch brightened over the

northern horizon; the tremulous flames of the aurora, pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson, shot upward

from it, and played with a weird apparition and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers looked, a gun

boomed from the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the bugle sprang out upon the silence.

Then they all said, "How perfectly in keeping everything has been!" and sauntered back to the hotel.

The Colonel went into the office to give the clerk another turn on the rack, and make him confess to a hidden

apartment somewhere, while Isabel left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invited Miss Kitty to

look at her coop in the fifth story. As they approached, light and music and laughter stole out of an open door

next hers, and Isabel, distinguishing the voices of the theatrical party, divined that this was the sickchamber,

and that they were again cheering up the afflicted member of the troupe. Some one was heard to say, "Well,

'ow do you feel now, Charley?" and a sound of subdued swearing responded, followed by more laughter, and

the twanging of a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a stir of feet and dresses as for departure.

The two listeners shrank together; as women they could not enjoy these proofs of the jolly camaraderie

existing among the people of the troupe. They trembled as before the merriment of as many lighthearted,

careless, goodnatured young men: it was no harm, but it was dismaying; and, "Dear!" cried Isabel, "what

"Go back," said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back they ran to the parlor, where they found Basil and the Colonel

and his wife in earnest conclave. The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show of a desperation

more violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally forced into the attitude of moderating his fury.

"Well, Fanny, that's all he can do for us; and I do think it 's the most outrageous thing in the world! It 's real

Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own denunciatory manner, but just then she was obliged to answer

Isabel's eager inquiry whether they had got a room yet. "Yes, a room," she said, "with two beds. But what are

we to do with one room? That clerkI don't know what to call him" ("Call him a hotelclerk, my dear;

you can't say anything worse,") interrupted her husband)"seems to think the matter perfectly settled."

"You see, Mrs. March," added the Colonel, "he's able to bully us in this way because he has the architecture

"Let me think a moment," said Isabel not thinking an instant. She had taken a fancy to at least two of these

people from the first, and in the last hour they had all become very well acquainted now she said, "I'll tell

you: there are two beds in our room also; we ladies will take one room, and you gentlemen the other!"

"Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of the Boston mind," said the Colonel, while his females civilly

protested and consented; "and I might almost hail you as our preserver. If ever you come to

Milwaukee,which is the centre of the world, as Boston is,weIshall be happy to have you call at my

place of business. I didn't commit myself, did I, Fanny? I am sometimes hospitable to excess, Mrs.

March," he said, to explain his aside. "And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and the gratitude of the

The whole party explored both rooms, and the ladies decided to keep Isabel's. The Colonel was dispatched to

see that the wraps and traps of his party were sent to this number, and Basil went with him. The things came

long before the gentlemen returned, but the ladies happily employed the interval in talking over the

excitements of the day, and in saying from time to time, "So very kind of you, Mrs. March," and "I don't

know what we should have done," and "Don't speak of it, please," and "I'm sure it 's a great pleasure to me."

In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid actor lay, and where lately there had been minstrelsy and

apparently dancing for his solace, there was now comparative silence. Two women's voices talked together,

and now and then a guitar was touched by a wandering hand. Isabel had just put up her handkerchief to

conceal her first yawn, when the gentlemen, odorous of cigars, returned to say goodnight.

The two men walked off together; but in ,a minute afterwards they had returned and were knocking

"O, what has happened?" chorused the ladies in woeful tune, seeing a certain wildness in the face that

"We don't know!" answered the others in as fearful a key, and related how they had found the door of their

room ajar, and a bright light streaming into the corridor. They did not stop to ponder this fact, but, with the

heedlessness of their sex, pushed the door wide open, when they saw seated before the mirror a bewildering

figure, with disheveled locks wandering down the back, and in dishabille expressive of being quite at home

there, which turned upon them a pair of pale blue eyes, under a forehead remarkable for the straggling fringe

of hair that covered it. They professed to have remained transfixed at the sight, and to have noted a like

dismay on the visage before the glass, ere they summoned strength to fly. These facts Colonel Ellison gave at

the command of his wife, with many protests and insincere delays amidst which the curiosity of his hearers

"And what do you suppose it was?" demanded his wife, with forced calmness, when he had at last made an

"It had a comb in its hand, for one thing; and besides, my dear, I hope I know a mermaid when I see it."

"Well," said Mrs. Ellison, "it was no mermaid, it was a mistake; and I'm going to see about it. Will you go

"No money could induce me! If it's a mistake, it isn't proper for me to go; if it's a mermaid, it's dangerous."

"O you coward!" said the intrepid little woman to a hero of all the fights on Sherman's march to the sea; and

presently they heard her attack the mysterious enemy with a ladylike courage, claiming the invaded

chamber. The foe replied with like civility, saying the clerk had given her that room with the understanding

that another lady was to be put there with her, and she had left the door unlocked to admit her. The watchers

with the sick man next door appeared and confirmed this speech, a feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to

"Of course," added the invader, "if I'd known 'ow it really was, I never would lave listened to such a thing,

never. And there isn't another 'ole in the louse to lay me 'ead," she concluded.

"Then it's the clerk's fault," said Mrs. Ellison, glad to retreat unharmed; and she made her husband ring for

the guilty wretch, a pale, quiet young Frenchman, whom the united party, sallying into the corridor, began to

upbraid in one breath, the lady in dishabille vanishing as often as she remembered it, and reappearing

The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked tribe, threw himself upon their mercy and confessed

everything: the house was so crowded, and he had been so crazed by the demands upon him, that he had

understood Colonel Ellison's application to be for a bed for the young lady in his party, and he had done the

very best he could. If the lady thereshe vanished againwould give up the room to the two gentlemen, he

would find her a place with the housekeeper. To this the lady consented without difficulty, and the rest

dispersing, she kissed one of the sick man's watchers with "Isn't it a shame, Bella?" and flitted down the

darkness of the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all, save the two assigned our travellers, to be occupied

by ladies of the troupe; their doors successively opened, and she was heard explaining to each as she passed.

The momentary displeasure which she had shown at her banishment was over. She detailed the facts with

perfect goodnature, and though the others appeared no more than herself to find any humorous cast in the

affair, they received her narration with the same amiability. They uttered their sympathy seriously, and each

"Richard," said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel's room the travellers had briefly celebrated these events, "I

"I do; but you can't think how I hate to go off alone. I wish you'd come part of the way with us, Ladies; I do

This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room, was answered from within by a sound of turning keys and

sliding bolts, and a low thunder as of bureaus and washstands rolled against the door. "The ladies are

fortifying their position," said the Colonel to Basil, and the two returned to their own chamber. "I don't wish

any intrusions," he said, instantly shutting himself in; "my nerves are too much shaken now. What an awfully

mysterious old place this Quebec is, Mr. March! I'll tell you what: it's my opinion that this is an enchanted

castle, and if my ribs are not walked over by a muleteer in the course of the night, it's all I ask."

In this and other discourse recalling the famous adventure of Don Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the labor of

disrobing, and had got as far as his boots, when there came a startling knock at the door. With one boot in his

hand and the other on his foot, the Colonel limped forward. "I suppose it's that clerk has sent to say he's made

some other mistake," and he flung wide the door, and then stood motionless before it, dumbly staring at a

figure on the threshold,a figure with the fringed forehead and pale blue eyes of her whom they had so

Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, "Excuse me, gentlemen," she said, with a dignity that recalled their

scattered senses, "but will you 'ave the goodness to look if my beads are on your tableO thanks, thanks,

thanks!" she continued, showing her face and one hand, as Basil blushingly advanced with a string of heavy

black beads, piously adorned with a large cross. "I'm sure, I'm greatly obliged to you, gentlemen, and I hask a

thousand pardons for troublin' you," she concluded in a somewhat severe tone, that left them abashed and

"Now, see here," said the Colonel, with a huge sigh as he closed the door again, and this time locked it, "I

should like to know how long this sort of thing is to be kept up? Because, if it's to be regularly repeated

during the night, I'm going to dress again." Nevertheless, he finished undressing and got into bed, where he

remained for some time silent. Basil put out the light. "O, I'm sorry you did that, my dear fellow," said the

Colonel; "but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no doubt. It's my belief that in the landlord's extremity of

bedlinen, I've been put to sleep between a pair of tablecloths; and I thought I'd like to look. It seems to me

that I make out a checkered pattern on top and a flowered or arabesque pattern underneath. I wish they had

given me mates. It 's pretty hard having to sleep between odd tablecloths. I shall complain to the landlord of

this in the morning. I've never had to sleep between odd tablecloths at any hotel before."

The Colonel's voice seemed scarcely to have died away upon Basil's drowsy ear, when suddenly the sounds

of music and laughter from the invalid's room startled him wide awake. The sick man's watchers were

coquetting with some one who stood in the little courtyard five stories below. A certain breadth of repartee

was naturally allowable at that distance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and the ladies mocked

him with the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him while they sang a snatch of song to the

twanging of the guitar, or talked professional gossip, and then returning to him with some tormenting

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could recollect few things intended for his pleasure

that had given him more satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the highgabled

silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents and the towers of the quaint city, that the scene

wanted nothing of the proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to those poor

souls as if they had meant him a favor. To us of the hither side of the footlights, there is always something

fascinating in the life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so unreal as in their

own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those mean upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry

submission to the errors and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless friendship, these

unprofitable devotees of the twinklingfooted burlesque seemed to be playing rather than living the life of

strolling players; and their lovemaking was the last touch of a comedy that Basil could hardly accept as

reality, it was so much more like something seen upon the stage. He would not have detracted anything from

the commonness and cheapness of the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily and confusedly, helped

to give it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction. But above all, he was pleased with the natural

eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his reveries

began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact that all this could have happened to

him in our commonplace time and hemisphere. "Why," he thought, "if I were a student in Alcala, what better

could I have asked?" And as at last his soul swung out from its moorings and lapsed down the broad slowly

circling tides out in the sea of sleep, he was conscious of one subtle touch of compassion for those poor

strollers,a pity so delicate and fine and tender that it hardly seemed his own but rather a sense of the

The travellers all met at breakfast and duly discussed the adventures of the night; and for the rest, the

forenoon passed rapidly and slowly with Basil and Isabel, as regret to leave Quebec, or the natural impatience

of travellers to be off, overcame them. Isabel spent part of it in shopping, for she had found some small sums

of money and certain odd corners in her trunks still unappropriated, and the handsome stores on the Rue

Fabrique were very tempting. She said she would just go in and look; and the wise reader imagines the result.

As she knelt over her boxes, trying so to distribute her purchases as to make them look as if they were old,

old things of hers, which she had brought all the way round from Boston with her, a fleeting touch of

"Basil," she said, "perhaps we'd better declare some of these things. What's the duty on those?" she asked,

"O then, dearest," responded Isabel indignantly, "it can't be wrong to smuggle! I won't declare a thread!"

"That's very well for you, whom they won't ask. But what if they ask me whether there's anything to

Isabel looked at her husband and hesitated. Then she replied in terms that I am proud to record in honor of

American womanhood: "You mustn't fib aboutit, Basil" (heroically); "I couldn't respect you if you did "

The ladies of the Ellison party, to whom she put the case in the parlor, agreed with her perfectly. They also

had done a little shopping in Quebec, and they meant to do more at Montreal before they returned to the

States. Mrs. Ellison was disposed to look upon Isabel's compunctions as a kind of treason to the sex, to be

The Ellisons were going up the Saguenay before coming on to Boston, and urged our friends hard to go with

them. "No, that must be for another time," said Isabel. "Mr. March has to be home by a certain day; and we

shall just get back in season." Then she made them promise to spend a day with her in Boston, and the

Colonel coming to say that he had a carriage at the door for their excursion to Lorette, the two parties bade

"What do you think of them, dearest?" demanded Isabel, as she sallied out with Basil for a final look at

"The young lady is the nicest; and the other is well enough, too. She is a good deal like you, but with the

"Well, her husband is jolly enough for both of them. He's funnier than you, Basil, and he hasn't any of your

little languid airs and affectations. I don't know but I'm a bit disappointed in my choice, darling; but I dare say

I shall work out of it. In fact, I don't know but the Colonel is a little too jolly. This drolling everything is

rather fatiguing." And having begun, they did not stop till they had taken their friends to pieces. Dismayed,

then, they hastily reconstructed them, and said that they were among the pleasantest people they ever knew,

and they were really very sorry to part with them, and they should do everything to make them have a good

They were sauntering towards Durham Terrace where they leaned long upon the iron parapet and blest

themselves with the beauty of the prospect. A tender haze hung upon the landscape and subdued it till the

scene was as a dream before them. As in a dream the river lay, and dreamlike the shipping moved or rested

on its deep, broad bosom. Far off stretched the happy fields with their dim white villages; farther still the

mellow heights melted into the low hovering heaven. The tinned roofs of the Lower Town twinkled in the

morning sun; around them on every hand, on that Monday forenoon when the States were stirring from ocean

to ocean in feverish industry, drowsed the gray city within her walls; from the flag staff of the citadel hung

Their hearts were strangely and deeply moved. It seemed to them that they looked upon the last stronghold of

the Past, and that afar off to the southward they could hear the marching hosts of the invading Present; and as

no young and loving soul can relinquish old things without a pang, they sighed a long mute farewell to

Next summer they would come again, yes; but, ah me' every one knows what next summer is!

Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the omnibus to the Grand Trunk Ferry with them, and were

goodnatured to the last, having shaken hands all round with the waiters, chambermaids, and porters of the

hotel. The young fellow with the bad amiable face came in a calash, and refused to overpay the driver with a

gay decision that made him Basil's envy till he saw his tribulation in getting the troupe's luggage checked.

There were forty pieces, and it always remained a mystery, considering the small amount of clothing

necessary to those people on the stage, what could have filled their trunks. The young man and the two

English blondes of American birth found places in the same car with our tourists, and enlivened the journey

with their frolics. When the young man pretended to fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head in a

shawl, and vexed him with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handful of almonds;

and the ladies having no other way to eat them, one of them saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked them

hammerwise with the heel. It was all so pleasant that it ought to have been all right; and in their merry world

The country into which the train plunges as soon as Quebec is out of sight is very stupidly savage, and our

friends had little else to do but to watch the gambols of the players, till they came to the river St. Francis,

whose wandering loveliness the road follows through an infinite series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and

finds everywhere glassing in its smooth current the elms and willows of its gentle shores. At one place, where

its calm broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge saw mill, covering the stream with logs and refuse, and the

banks with whole cities of lumber; which also they accepted as no mean elements of the picturesque. They

clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant life they were leaving. When some French boys came aboard

with wild raspberries to sell in little birchbark canoes, they thrilled with pleasure, and bought them, but

sighed then, and said, "What thing characteristic of the local life will they sell us in Maine when we get

there? A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the squash vine, or popcorn in its native

tissuepaper, and advertising the new Dollar Store in Portland?" They saw the quaintness vanish from the

farm houses; first the dormerwindows, then the curve of the steep roof, then the steep roof itself. By and

by they came to a store with a Grecian portico and four square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked no

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at Island Pond took place at nine o'clock, without costing them a

cent of duty or a pang of conscience. At that charming station the trunks are piled higgledy piggledy into a

room beside the track, where a few inspectors with stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the passengers.

There are no porters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out his box, and opens it

before the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents with an unpleasant hand and passes it. He makes you feel

that you are once more in the land of official insolence, and that, whatever you are collectively, you are

nothing personally. Isabel, who had sent her husband upon this business with quaking meekness of heart,

experienced the bold indignation of virtue at his account of the way people were made their own

baggagesmashers, and would not be amused when he painted the vile terrors of each husband as he

The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadows of westernlooking Maine; and the Grand Trunk

brought them, of course, an hour behind time into Portland. All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston

train on the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show how uninteresting the earth can be

when she is 'ennuyee' of both sea and land), Basil's life became a struggle to construct a meal from the

fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they stopped five minutes for refreshments. At

one place he achieved two cups of shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of elderly

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn in Canada, brooded sovereign upon

the tiresome landscape. The red granite rocks were as if redhot; the banks of the deep cuts were like ash

heaps; over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they almost heard the grasshoppers sing

above the rattle of the train. When they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of us would like to

be a hundred years hence. The whole city was equally dusty; and they found the trees in the square before

their own door gray with dust. The bit of Virginiacreeper planted under the window hung shriveled upon its

But Isabel's aunt met them with a refreshing shower of tears and kisses in the hall, throwing a solid arm about

each of them. "O you dears!" the good soul cried, "you don't know how anxious I've been about you; so many

accidents happening all the time. I've never read the 'Evening Transcript' till the next morning, for fear I

"O aunty, you're too good, always!" whimpered Isabel; and neither of the women took note of Basil, who

The little tinge of discontent, which had colored their sentiment of return faded now in the kindly light of

home. Their holiday was over, to be sure, but their bliss had but began; they had entered upon that long life of

holidays which is happy marriage. By the time dinner was ended they were both enthusiastic at having got

back, and taking their aunt between them walked up and down the parlor with their arms round her massive

Then Basil said he really must run down to the office that afternoon, and he issued all aglow upon the street.

He was so full of having been long away and of having just returned, that he unconsciously tried to impart his

mood to Boston, and the dusty composure of the street and houses, as he strode along, bewildered him. He

longed for some familiar face to welcome him, and in the horsecar into which he stepped he was charmed to

see an acquaintance. This was a man for whom ordinarily he cared nothing, and whom he would perhaps

rather have gone out upon the platform to avoid than have spoken to; but now he plunged at him with

The other remained coldly unaffected, after a first start of surprise at his cordiality, and then reviled the dust

and heat. "But I'm going to take a little run down to Newport, tomorrow, for a week," he said. "By the way,

you look as if you needed a little change. Aren't you going anywhere this summer?"

"So you see, my dear," observed Basil, when he had recounted the fact to Isabel at tea, "our travels are

incommunicably our own. We had best say nothing about our little jaunt to other people, and they won't

know we've been gone. Even if we tried, we couldn't make our weddingjourney theirs."

She gave him a great kiss of recompense and consolation. "Who wants it," she demanded, "to be Their

Life had not used them ill in this time, and the fairish treatment they had received was not wholly unmerited.

The twelve years past had made them older, as the years must in passing. Basil was now fortytwo, and his

moustache was well sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirtynine, and the parting of her hair had thinned and

retreated; but she managed to give it an effect of youthful abundance by combing it low down upon her

forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush. By gaslight she was still very pretty; she believed that she

looked more interesting, and she thought Basil's gray moustache distinguished. He had grown stouter; he

filled his doublebreasted frock coat compactly, and from time to time he had the buttons set forward; his

hands were rounded up on the backs, and he no longer wore his old number of gloves by two sizes; no

amount of powder or manipulation from the young lady in the shop would induce them to go on. But this did

not matter much now, for he seldom wore gloves at all. He was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare in

that direction, for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully after the out goes. The insurance business was

not what it had been, and though Basil had comfortably established himself in it, he had not made money. He

sometimes thought that he might have done quite as well if he had gone into literature; but it was now too

late. They had not a very large family: they had a boy of eleven, who took after his father, and a girl of nine,

who took after the boy; but with the American feeling that their children must have the best of everything,

The narrowness of their means, as well as their household cares, had kept them from taking many long

journeys. They passed their winters in Boston, and their summers on the South Shore, cheaper than the North

Shore, and near enough for Basil to go up and down every day for business; but they promised themselves

that some day they would revisit certain points on their wedding journey, and perhaps somewhere find their

lost secondyouth on the track. It was not that they cared to be young, but they wished the children to see

them as they used to be when they thought themselves very old; and one lovely afternoon in June they started

It had been very hot for several days, but that morning the east wind came in, and crisped the air till it seemed

to rustle like tinsel, and the sky was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chromoed. They felt that

they were really looking up into the roof of the world, when they glanced at it; but when an old gentleman

hastily kissed a young woman, and commended her to the conductor as being one who was going all the way

to San Francisco alone, and then risked his life by stepping off the moving train, the vastness of the great

American fact began to affect Isabel disagreeably. "Is n't it too big, Basil?" she pleaded, peering timidly out

of the little municipal consciousness in which she had been so long housed. In that seclusion she had

suffered certain original tendencies to increase upon her; her nerves were more sensitive and electrical; her

apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond the ratio of the dangers that beset her; and Basil had counted upon

a tonic effect of the change the journey would make in their daily lives. She looked ruefully out of the

window at the familiar suburbs whisking out of sight, and the continental immensity that advanced

devouringly upon her. But they had the best section in the very centre of the sleepingcar, she drew what

consolation she could from the fact,and the children's premature demand for lunch helped her to forget her

anxieties; they began to be hungry as soon as the train started. She found that she had not put up sandwiches

enough; and when she told Basil that he would have to get out somewhere and buy some cold chicken, he

asked her what in the world had become of that whole ham she had had boiled. It seemed to him, he said, that

there was enough of it to subsist them to Niagara and back; and he went on as some men do, while

Somerville vanished, and even Tufts College, which assails the Bostonian vision from every point of the

They had chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara, because, as Basil said, their experience of travel had

never yet included a very long tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the children would always

remember the journey, if nothing else remarkable happened to impress it upon them. Indeed, they were so

much concerned in it that they began to ask when they should come to this tunnel, even before they began to

ask for lunch; and the long time before they reached it was not perceptibly shortened by Tom's

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that their fellowpassengers were so interesting as their fellow

passengers used to be in their former days of travel. They were soberly dressed, and were all of a

middleaged sobriety of deportment, from which nothing salient offered itself for conjecture or speculation;

and there was little within the car to take their minds from the brilliant young world that flashed and sang by

them outside. The belated spring had ripened, with its frequent rains, into the perfection of early summer; the

grass was thicker and the foliage denser than they had ever seen it before; and when they had run out into the

hills beyond Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts

among the underbrush, and overflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows, of the railroad

embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink. Its shy, wild beauty ceased whenever the train

stopped, but the orioles made up for its absence with their singing in the village trees about the stations; and

though Fitchburg and Ayer's Junction and Athol are not names that invoke historical or romantic associations,

the hearts of Basil and Isabel began to stir with the joy of travel before they had passed these points. At the

first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken which had been commanded, and he recognized in the keeper of the

railroad restaurant their former conductor, who had been warned by the spirits never to travel without a

flower of some sort carried between his lips, and who had preserved his own life and the lives of his

passengers for many years by this simple device. His presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie and

baked beans a supernatural interest, and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the athletic bird which the

mystical expartner of fate had sold him; he justly reflected that if he had heard the story of the restaurateur's

superstition in a foreign land, or another time, he would have found in it a certain poetry. It was this

willingness to find poetry in things around them that kept his life and Isabel's fresh, and they taught their

children the secret of their elixir. To be sure, it was only a genre poetry, but it was such as has always

inspired English art and song; and now the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith

or Wordsworth, the flying sentiment of the railroad side. There was a simple interior at one place, a small

shanty, showing through the open door a cook stove surmounted by the evening coffeepot, with a lazy cat

outstretched upon the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman standing just outside the threshold to

see the train go by,which had an unrivaled value till they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the

woods, in which the railroad workmen boardedsome were lounging on the platform and at the open

windows, while others were "washing up" for supper, and the whole scene was full of holiday ease and

sylvan comradery that went to the hearts of the sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately been reading aloud

the delightful history of Rudder Grange, and the children, who had made their secret vows never to live in

anything but an old canalboat when they grew up, owned that there were fascinating possibilities in a

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on either hand, with smooth stretches of the quiet river, and

breadths of grassy intervale and tableland; the elms grouped themselves like the trees of a park; here and

there the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed hollows, full of golden light and

delicious shadow. There were people rowing on the water; and every pretty town had some touch of

picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, there were children playing in the newmown hay

along the railroad embankment; at Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going on (among the English

operatives of the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked down from their carwindow on a

young lady swinging in a hammock, in her dooryard, and on an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group

of girls waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a boy paused in weeding a gardenbed,and

probably denied that he had paused, later. In the mean time the golden haze along the mountain side changed

to a clear, pearly lustre, and the quiet evening possessed the quiet landscape. They confessed to each other

that it was all as sweet and beautiful as it used to be; and in fact they had seen palaces, in other days, which

did not give them the pleasure they found in a woodcutter's shanty, losing itself among the shadows in a

solitude of the hills. The tunnel, after this, was a gross and material sensation; but they joined the children in

trying to hold and keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his watch. "Now," said Tom, when five minutes

were gone, "we are under the very centre of the mountain." But the tunnel was like all accomplished facts, all

hopes fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the sense; and the children emerged at North

Adams with but a mean opinion of that great feat of engineering. Basil drew a pretty moral from their

experience. "If you rode upon a comet you would be disappointed. Take my advice, and never ride upon a

comet. I shouldn't object to your riding on a little meteor,you would n't expect much of that; but I warn

The children thought this moral was a joke at their expense, and as they were a little sleepy they permitted

themselves the luxury of feeling trifled with. But they woke, refreshed and encouraged, from slumbers that

had evidently been unbroken, though they both protested that they had not slept a wink the whole night, and

gave themselves up to wonder at the interminable levels of Western New York over which the train was

running. The longing to come to an edge, somewhere, that the New England traveler experiences on this

plain, was inarticulate with the children; but it breathed in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed even the

architectural inequalities of a city into which they drew in the early morning. This city showed to their weary

eyes a noble stretch of river, from the waters of which lofty piles of buildings rose abruptly; and Isabel, being

left to guess where they were, could think of no other place so picturesque as Rochester.

"Yes," said her husband; "it is our own Enchanted City. I wonder if that unstinted hospitality is still dispensed

by the good head waiter at the hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties who have passed the ordeal of the

haughty hotel clerk. I wonder what has become of that hotel clerk. Has he fallen, through pride, to some

lower level, or has he bowed his arrogant spirit to the demands of advancing civilization, and realized that he

is the servant, and not the master, of the public? I think I've noticed, since his time, a growing kindness in

hotel clerks; or perhaps I have become of a more impressive presence; they certainly unbend to me a little

more. I should like to go up to our hotel, and try myself on our old enemy, if he is still there. I can fancy how

his shirt front has expanded in these twelve years past; he has grown a little bald, after the fashion of

middleaged hotel clerks, but he parts his hair very much on one side, and brushes it squarely across his

forehead to hide his loss; the forefinger that he touches that little snapbell with, when he doesn't look at you,

must be very pudgy now. Come, let us get out and breakfast at, Rochester; they will give us broiled whitefish;

"No, no, Basil," cried his wife. "It would be sacrilege! All that is sacred to those dear young days of ours; and

I wouldn't think of trying to repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that diningroom to reproach us for

our intrusion! Oh, perhaps we have done a wicked thing in coming this journey! We ought to have left the

past alone; we shall only mar our memories of all these beautiful places. Do you suppose Buffalo can be as

poetical as it was then? Buffalo! The name does n't invite the Muse very much. Perhaps it never was very

poetical! Oh, Basil, dear, I'm afraid we have only come to find out that we were mistaken about everything!

I'm not troubled! We won't disturb our dream of Rochester; but I don't despair of Buffalo. I'm sure that

"Well, well," murmured Isabel, "I hope you're right;" and she put some things together for leaving their car at

When they reached a place where the land mated its level with the level of the lake, they ran into a wilderness

of railroad cars, in a world where life seemed to be operated solely by locomotives and their helpless

minions. The bellowing and bleating trains were arriving in every direction, not only along the ground floor

of the plain, but stately stretches of trestlework, which curved and extended across the plain, carried them to

and fro overhead. The travelers owned that this railroad suburb had its own impressiveness, and they said that

the trestlework was as noble in effect as the lines of aqueduct that stalk across the Roman Campagna.

Perhaps this was because they had not seen the Campagna or its aqueducts for a great while; but they were so

glad to find themselves in the spirit of their former journey again that they were amiable to everything. When

the children first caught sight of the lake's delicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelier than the sea, they

felt quite a local pride in their preference. It was what Isabel had said twelve years before, on first beholding

But they did not really see the lake till they had taken the train for Niagara Falls, after breakfasting in the

depot, where the children, used to the severe native or the patronizing Irish ministrations of Boston

restaurants and hotels, reveled for the first time in the affectionate devotion of a black waiter. There was

already a ridiculous abundance and variety on the table; but this waiter brought them strawberries and again

strawberries, and repeated plates of griddle cakes with maple syrup; and he hung over the back of first one

chair and then another with an unselfish joy in the appetites of the breakfasters which gave Basil renewed

hopes of his race. "Such rapture in serving argues a largeness of nature which will be recognized hereafter,"

he said, feeling about in his waistcoat pocket for a quarter. It seemed a pity to render the waiter's zeal

retroactively interested, but in view of the fact that he possibly expected the quarter, there was nothing else to

do; and by a mysterious stroke of gratitude the waiter delivered them into the hands of a friend, who took

another quarter from them for carrying their bags and wraps to the train. This second retainer approved their

admiration of the aesthetic forms and colors of the depot colonnade; and being asked if that were the depot

"There were a great many killed, were n't there?" asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfaction in the disaster.

The porter seemed humiliated; he confessed the mortifying truth that the loss of life was small, but he

recovered a just selfrespect in adding, "If the roof had fallen in five minutes sooner, it would have killed

Basil had promised the children a sight of the Rapids before they reached the Falls, and they held him rigidly

accountable from the moment they entered the train, and began to run out of the city between the river and

the canal. He attempted a diversion with the canal boats, and tried to bring forward the subject of Rudder

Grange in that connection. They said that the canal boats were splendid, but they were looking for the Rapids

now; and they declined to be interested in a window in one of the boats, which Basil said was just like the

window that the Rudder Granger and the boarder had popped Pomona out of when they took her for a

"You spoil those children, Basil," said his wife, as they clambered over him, and clamored for the Rapids.

"At present I'm giving them an objectlesson in patience and selfdenial; they are experiencing the fact that

they can't have the Rapids till they get to them, and probably they'll be disappointed in them when they

In fact, they valued the Rapids very little more than the Hoosac Tunnel, when they came in sight of them, at

last; and Basil had some question in his own mind whether the Rapids had not dwindled since his former

visit. He did not breathe this doubt to Isabel, however, and she arrived at the Falls with unabated

expectations. They were going to spend only half a day there; and they turned into the station, away from the

phalanx of omnibuses, when they dismounted from their train. They seemed, as before, to be the only

passengers who had arrived, and they found an abundant choice of carriages waiting in the street, outside the

station. The Niagara hackman may once have been a predatory and very rampant animal, but public opinion,

long expressed through the public prints, has reduced him to silence and meekness. Apparently, he may not

so much as beckon with his whip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that he cannot cross the pavement to

the station door; and Basil, inviting one of them to negotiation, was himself required by the attendant

policeman to step out to the curbstone, and complete his transaction there. It was an impressive illustration of

the power of a free press, but upon the whole Basil found the effect melancholy; it had the saddening quality

which inheres in every sort of perfection. The hackman, reduced to entire order, appealed to his compassion,

and he had not the heart to beat him down from his moderate first demand, as perhaps he ought to have done.

They drove directly to the cataract, and found themselves in the pretty grove beside the American Fall, and in

the air whose dampness was as familiar as if they had breathed it all their childhood. It was full now of the

fragrance of some sort of wild blossom; and again they had that old, entrancing sense of the mingled

awfulness and loveliness of the great spectacle. This sylvan perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, the mildness

of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead, and the bird singing that made itself heard amid the roar of the

rapids and the solemn incessant plunge of the cataract, moved their hearts, and made them children with the

boy and girl, who stood rapt for a moment and then broke into joyful wonder. They could sympathize with

the ardor with which Tom longed to tempt fate at the brink of the river, and over the tops of the parapets

which have been built along the edge of the precipice, and they equally entered into the terror with which

Bella screamed at his suicidal zeal. They joined her in restraining him; they reduced him to a beggarly

account of half a dozen stones, flung into the Rapids at not less than ten paces from the brink; and they would

not let him toss the smallest pebble over the parapet, though he laughed to scorn the notion that anybody

It seemed to them that the triviality of man in the surroundings of the Falls had increased with the lapse of

time. There were more booths and bazaars, and more colored feather fans with whole birds spitted in the

centres; and there was an offensive array of blue and green and yellow glasses on the shore, through which

you were expected to look at the Falls gratis. They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indian maids,

who used to squat about on the grass, with their laps full of moccasins and pincushions. But, as of old, the

photographer came out of his saloon, and invited them to pose for a family group; representing that the light

and the spray were singularly propitious, and that everything in nature invited them to be taken. Basil put him

off gently, for the sake of the time when he had refused to be photographed in a bridal group, and took refuge

from him in the long low building from which you descend to the foot of the cataract.

The grove beside the American Fall has been inclosed, and named Prospect Park, by a company which exacts

half a dollar for admittance, and then makes you free of all its wonders and conveniences, for which you once

had to pay severally. This is well enough; but formerly you could refuse to go down the inclined tramway,

and now you cannot, without feeling that you have failed to get your money's worth. It was in this illogical

spirit of economy that Basil invited his family to the descent; but Isabel shook her head. "No, you go with the

children," she said, "and I will stay, here, till you get back;" her agonized countenance added, "and pray for

you;" and Basil took his children on either side of him, and rumbled down the, terrible descent with much of

the excitement that attends travel in an open horsecar. When he stepped out of the car he felt that increase of

courage which comes to every man after safely passing through danger. He resolved to brave the mists and

slippery stones at the foot of the Fall; and he would have plunged at once into this fresh peril, if he had not

been prevented by the Prospect Park Company. This ingenious association has built a large tunnellike shed

quite to the water's edge, so that you cannot view the cataract as you once could, at a reasonable remoteness,

but must emerge from the building into a storm of spray. The roof of the tunnel is painted with a lively effect

in partycolored stripes, and is lettered "The Shadow of the Rock," so that you take it at first to be an appeal

to your aesthetic sense; but the real object of the company is not apparent till you put your head out into the

tempest, when you agree with the nearest guide and one is always very nearthat you had better have an

oilskin dress, as Basil did. He told the guide that he did not wish to go under the Fall, and the guide

confidentially admitted that there was no fun in that, any way; and in the mean time he equipped him and his

children for their foray into the mist. When they issued forth, under their friend's leadership, Basil felt that,

with his children clinging to each hand, he looked like some sort of animal with its young, and, though not

unsocial by nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the time. They climbed hither and thither over the

rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for the views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift of the spray

they really caught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The next instant the spray swirled

back, and they were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow, lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and

naturally as if that had been the habit of rainbows ever since the flood. This was all there was to be done, and

they streamed back into the tunnel, where they disrobed in the face of a menacing placard, which announced

"Oh, pooh, no!" returned Basil; "we have n't been under the Fall." But he sought out the proprietor with a

trembling heart. The proprietor was a man of severely logical mind; he said that the charge would be three

dollars, for they had had the use of the dresses and the guide just the same as if they had gone under the Fall;

and he refused to recognize anything misleading in the dressingroom placard: In fine, he left Basil without a

leg to stand upon. It was not so much the three dollars as the sense of having been swindled that vexed him;

and he instantly resolved not to share his annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put that burden upon

her? If she were none the wiser, she would be none the poorer; and he ought to be willing to deny himself her

He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary unconsciousness, and he listened with

her to the tale their coachman told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a Frenchman

and his wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a stroll on Goat Island, and reported with

much apparent concern that his wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall. It was so natural

for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the peculiar circumstances, that every one condoled with

the widower; but when a few days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband refused to come

back from New York to her funeral, there was a general regret that he had not been arrested. A flash of

conviction illumed the whole fact to Basil's guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar

for the use of an oilskin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife,

till, in a moment of remorse and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then Basil looked at the

mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from Niagara without being forced to a

similar excess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at the very first act of spendthrift profusion she committed.

The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery had clung for twentyfour hours before he was

carried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband Isabel's bonnet ribbons seemed to

flutter from the pointed reef. He could endure the pretty arbor no longer. "Come, children!" he cried, with a

wild, unnatural gayety; "let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the Three Sisters, that your mother

"For shame, Basil!" retorted Isabel. "You know it was you who were afraid of that bridge."

The children, who knew the story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his

simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

"What extortion!" cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly unnerved him. He trembled upon the verge of

confession; but he had finally the moral force to resist. He suffered her to compute the cost of their stay at

Niagara without allowing those three dollars to enter into her calculation; he even began to think what

justificative extravagance he could tempt her to. He suggested the purchase of local bricabrac; he asked

her if she would not like to dine at the International, for old times' sake. But she answered, with disheartening

virtue, that they must not think of such a thing, after what they had spent already. Nothing, perhaps, marked

In the mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned herself to the charm of the place, which she found unimpaired,

in spite of the reported ravages of improvement about Niagara. Goat Island was still the sylvan solitude of

twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer nymphs and dryads than of old. The air was full of the perfume that

scented it at Prospect Park; the leaves showered them with shade and sun, as they drove along. "If it were not

for the children here," she said, "I should think that our first drive on Goat Island had never ended."

She sighed a little, and Basil leaned forward and took her hand in his. "It never has ended; it's the same drive;

only we are younger now, and enjoy it more." It always touched him when Isabel was sentimental about the

past, for the years had tended to make her rather more seriously maternal towards him than towards the other

children; and he recognized that these fond reminiscences were the expression of the girlhood still lurking

She shook her head. "No, but I'm willing the children should be young in our place. It's only fair they should

She remained in the carriage, while Basil visited the various points of view on Luna Island with the boy and

girl. A boy is probably of considerable interest to himself, and a man looks back at his own boyhood with

some pathos. But in his actuality a boy has very little to commend him to the toleration of other human

beings. Tom was very well, as boys go; but now his contribution to the common enjoyment was to venture as

near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into the water, and to make as if to throw them over

precipices on the people below; to pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous mementos of the

vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes, while he could cut his

initials on a bandrail. "You can come back and see 'em on your bridal tower," said the driver. Isabel gave a

little start, as if she had almost thought of something she was trying to think of.

They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered a couple making a tour of the island

on foot. But none of these people were young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited only

by persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating lunch to the music of the shouting

Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she preferred to refute his story of her former panic

on those islands by remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb novelty which

nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the

rock has fallen and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from below, and flashes a

hundred feet into the air, in rocketlike jets and points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic

curves of a perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in celebrating the display, with the

purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather keep

her Niagara unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood him, there must be something rather cheap

and conscious in the new feature. She approved, however, of the change that had removed that foolish little

Terrapin Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she confessed that she could have enjoyed a little

variety in the stories the driver told them of the Indian burialground on the island: they were exactly the

stories she and Basil had heard twelve years before, and the illstarred goats, from which the island took its

Under the influence of his romances our travelers began to find the whole scene hackneyed; and they were

glad to part from him a little sooner than they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous village

on foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of the local preparation. Surely the

hotels are nowhere else in the world so large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill

them? They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all these

magnificent equipages are waiting about the empty streets for the people who never come to hire them.

"It seems to me that I don't see so many strangers here as I used," Basil had suggested to their driver.

"Oh, they have n't commenced coming yet," he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended that they were

They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who advertised a table d'hote dinner on a board

at his door; and they put their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended that Niagara

was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In fact, they observed that their regret for the supposed

decline of the Falls as a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in their offers of

Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them there, while he walked down the village

street, for a closer inspection of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in the solitude,

as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk's island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and callboys seated

in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some

deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit,

when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest

gayety. He turned for consolation into the barber's shop, where he found himself the only customer, and no

busy sound of "Next" greeted his ear. But the barber, like all the rest, said that Niagara was not unusually

empty; and he came out feeling bewildered and defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats which descend the

Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil went to him and pretended that he was going to buy a

ticket. But a glance at the agent's sign showed Basil that the agent, with his brave jollity of manner and his

impressive "Goodmorning," had passed away from the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited by

his widow, who in turn was absent, and temporarily represented by their son. The boy, in supplying Basil

with an advertisement of the line, made a specious show of haste, as if there were a long queue of tourists

waiting behind him to be served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a spectral line there, but Basil was

the only tourist present in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation, and fled with the advertisement in his

"Basil," she cried, "I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the brides?"

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from

the children, who were examining at the newsman's booth the moccasins and the birchbark bricabrac of

the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.

"My dear," he said, "there are no brides; everybody was married twelve years ago, and the brides are

middleaged mothers of families now, and don't come to Niagara if they are wise."

"Yes," she desolately asserted, "that is so! Something has been hanging over me ever since we came, and

suddenly I realized that it was the absence of the brides. Butbutdown at the hotelsDidn't you see

anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of minstrelsy? Was there" She

"Perhaps," said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella for a newlypurchased paper of sour

cherries, and helplessly forecasting in his remoter mind the probable consequences, "there were both brides

and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we

are always of our own time, and we live amid contemporary things. I daresay there were middleaged people

at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them, nor they us. I daresay that the place is now

swarming with bridal couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a

howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the

reason why they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness. Do you suppose,

Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do anything to bring us

Isabel caught away her hand. "Basil," she cried, "it would be disgusting! I wouldn't do it for the worldnot

even for that world. I saw one middleaged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the Cave of the

Winds, or somewhere, with the children. They were sitting on some steps, he a step below her, and he seemed

to want to put his head on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn't dare. We should look like them,

if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don't you think we should look like them?"

They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they both laughed. "We couldn't look young

if we quarreled a week," he said. "We had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall do

if we live to be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they don't see our bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper

Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair. "Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall not have a wink of

sleep with them tonight. Where is that nux?" She hunted for the medicine in her bag, and the children

submitted; for they had eaten all the cherries, and they took their medicine without a murmur. "I wonder at

your letting them eat the sour things, Basil," said their mother, when the children bad run off to the newsstand

"I wonder that you left me to see what they were doing," promptly retorted their father.

"It was your nonsense about the brides," said Isabel; "and I think this has been a lesson to us. Don't let them

"They are safe; they have no more money. They are frugally confining themselves to the admiration of the

Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why have our Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?"

Isabel despised the small pleasantry. "Then you saw nobody at the hotel?" she asked.

"Ah, yes," said Isabel; "that was where we met them. How long ago it seems! And poor little Kitty! I wonder

what has become of them? But I'm glad they're not here. That's what makes you realize your age: meeting the

same people in the same place a great while after, and seeing how oldthey've grown. I don't think I could

bear to see Kitty Ellison again. I'm glad she did n't come to visit us in Boston, though, after what happened,

she could n't, poor thing! I wonder if she 's ever regretted her breaking with him in the way she did. It's a very

painful thing to think of,such an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as if they ought to meet again,

His wife remained serious. "It was a very fine point,a very little thing to reject a man for. I felt that when I

"Oh yes, you did; but you forget everything. You know that they met two Boston ladies just after they were

engaged, and she believed that he did n't introduce her because he was ashamed of her countrified appearance

"He might not have meant to ignore her," answered Isabel thoughtfully; "he might have chosen not to

introduce her because he felt too proud of her to subject her to any possible misappreciation from them. You

"Why didn't you look at it in that way? You advised her against giving him another chance. Why did you?"

"Why?" repeated Isabel, absently. "Oh, a woman does n't judge a man by what he does, but by what he is! I

knew that if she dismissed him it was because she never really had trusted or could trust his love; and I

"Well, very possibly you were right. At any rate, you have the consolation of knowing that it's too late to help

"Yes, it's too late," said Isabel; and her thoughts went back to her meeting with the young girl whom she had

liked so much, and whose after history had interested her so painfully. It seemed to her a hard world that

could come to nothing better than that for the girl whom she had seen in her first glimpse of it that night.

Where was she now? What had become of her? If she had married that man, would she have been any

happier? Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girl imagines it; she herself had found that

out. It was a state of trial, of probation; it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken each

other's hearts and parted, would not the fragments of their lives have been on a much finer, much higher

plane? Had not the commonplace, everyday experiences of marriage vulgarized them both? To be sure,

there were the children; but if they had never had the children, she would never have missed them; and if

Basil had, for example, died just before they were marriedShe started from this wicked reverie, and ran

towards her husband, whose broad, honest back, with no visible neck or shirtcollar, was turned towards her,

as he stood, with his head thrown up, studying a timetable on the wall; she passed her arm convulsively

"It's time to be getting our bags out to the train, Basil! Come, Bella! Tom, we're going!"

The children reluctantly turned from the newsman's trumpery, and they all went out to the track, and took

seats on the benches under the colonnade. While they waited; the train for Buffalo drew in, and they

remained watching it till it started. In the last car that passed them, when it was fairly under way, a face

looked full at Isabel from one of the windows. In that moment of astonishment she forgot to observe whether

it was sad or glad; she only saw, or believed she saw, the light of recognition dawn into its eyes, and then it

"Oh no, it wasn't," said Basil, easily. "It looked like her; but it looked at least ten years older."

"Why, of course it was! We're all ten years older," returned his wife in such indignation at his stupidity that

she neglected to insist upon his stopping the train, which was rapidly diminishing in the perspective.

He declared it was only a fancied resemblance; she contended that this was in the neighborhood of Eriecreek,

and it must be Kitty; and thus one of their most inveterate disagreements began.

Their own train drew into the depot, and they disputed upon the fact in question till they entered on the

passage of the Suspension Bridge. Then Basil rose and called the children to his side. On the left hand, far up

the river, the great Fall shows, with its mists at its foot and its rainbow on its brow, as silent and still as if it

were vastly painted there; and below the bridge on the right, leap the Rapids in the narrow gorge, like seas on

a rocky shore. "Look on both sides, now," he said to the children. "Isabel you must see this!"

Isabel had been preparing for the passage of this bridge ever since she left Boston. "Never!" she exclaimed.

She instantly closed her eyes, and hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanks to this precaution of hers, the train