Their wedding journey

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Boston and New York.

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

BY

W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOURNEYS ?'
ETC., ETC.

WITH AN ADDITIONAL CHAPTER ON NIAGARA
REVISITED

ILLUSTRATED BY AUGUSTUS ffOPPIX

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1891

Copyright, 1871 and 1888,
By W. D. HOWELLS.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS.

— «

PAGE
I.

I'm. Outset 1

II.

A MlD8UMXl Dr.EAM ...,.,. 35

III.

The Night B«>at 56

IV.
A Day's Railroading 80

V.
I'm: Enchanted City, and beyond .«.,.. 97

VI.
Niagara 119

vi r.

Down the St. Lawrence 172

VIII.
The Sentiment of Montreal 195

IX.
Qif.be( 228

lv CONTENTS.

X.

Homeward and Home 279

XI.

Niagara Revisited, Twelve Years after their Wedding
Journey 2g8

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

i.

THE OUTSET.

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 love-story, which I do not think myself qual-
ified 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 attempt-

2 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

ing to tell the reader of the wedding-journey of
a newly married couple, no longer very young, to
be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I
shaill have nothing to do but to talk of some ordi-
nary traits of American life as these appeared to
them, to speak a little of well-known and easily
accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape
and now a sketch of character.

They had agreed to make their wedding-journey
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 wedding-break-
fast, all tears and teousseau, and had people want-
ing to see you aboard the cars. Now there will not
be a suspicion of honey-moonshine 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 run 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 we ? My one horror in life is an ev-
ident bride."

THE OUTSET. 8

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 Isa-
bel'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 engage-
ment, which but for that fatality they might have
spent together, he imagined, in just »uch rapture
as this. The regret always haunted him, more or
less ; it was part of his love ; the loss accounted
irreparable really enriched the final gain.

" 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 cars — they're
beginning to have them on the palace-cars."

Just then a shadow fell into the room.

" Wasn't that thunder, Isabel ? " asked her
nunt, who had been contentedly surveying the ten-
ier spectacle before her. " O dear ! you'll never be
able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It Js
actually raining now ! "

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

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY".

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
dining-room windows the trees whitened in the
gusts, and darkened in the driving floods of the rain-
fall, 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 some-
thing splendidly theatrical about it all ; and when a
street-car, laden to the last inch of its capacity,
came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under
the stinging blows of the hail-stones, 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
fcwtent reality in the affair, and at intervals during
the storm they debated about going at aU 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 aa
pungent a national character as possible, and that

THE OUTSET. 6

Ad be could imagine nothing more peculiarly Amer-
ican 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 para-
lyzed 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 sleeping-car. Having comfortably ac-
complished 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 tho'igh
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

d THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY.

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 was early to
begin.

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
Beven 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 baggage-mas-
ter did his duty with pitiless celerity ; and so Ba-
sil, in the mere excess of his disoccupation, bough;
an accident-insurance 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
Chambe"ry ? and the numbers of military gentlemen
that waited too, with their little waists, and their

THE OUTSET. 1

kisses when they met ? and that poor married mili-
tary gentleman, with the plain wile and the two
children, and a tarnished uniform ? He seemed to
be somehow in misfortune, and his mustache huug
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 every-
where are delightful , and there is such a commun-
ity of interest in them all, that when I come here
only to go out to Brookline, I feel myself a travel-
ler 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 foi hav
ing been so long lost."

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

" Isabel, you will be having your head on my
shoulder, next," said he.

" Never I " she answered fiercely, recovering her
distance with a start. " But, dearest, if you do see
me going to — act absurdly, you know, do stop
me

'• I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop.
Besides, I didn't undertake to preserve the incog-
nito of this bridal party."

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

THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY.

room. To be sure *I>8 ticket-seller was there, a^i
the lady who checked packages left in her charge ,

but these must have seen so many endearment
pass between passengers, that a fleeting caress

s
or

THE OUTSET. 9

huo would scarcely have drawn their notice to oui
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 hap-
piness from first to last on this journey. The trav-
esty began with the very first people who entered
the waiting-room 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 flut-
tered 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 fe-
males 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 rude-
ness, 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 at-
tempt to bring the other girl within its warmth.

10

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 pres-
ently 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 couple — from 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 New-Yorkeress was stylish, undeniably effective.
The gentleman bought a ticket for New York, and
remained at the window of the office talking quite
easily with the seller.

" You couldn't do that, my poor Basil," said
Isabel, "you'd be afraid."

" O dear, yes ; I'm only too glad to get off with-
out browbeating ; though I must say that this offi-
cer looks affable enough. Really," he added, as an
acquaintance of the ticket-seller came in and nod-
ded to him and said « Hot, to-day ! " « this is very
strange. I always felt as if these men had no pri-
vate 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 incredible
they should have the common personal relations."
At intervals of their talk and silence there cam*

THE OUTSET. 1\

vivid flash os of lightning and quite heavy shoeks of
thunder, very eonsoling to our friends, who took
them as so many compliments to their prudenc
Uv)t going by the boat, and who had secret doubte
of their wisdom whenever these acknowledgment*
were withheld. Isabel went so far as to say thai
she hoped nothing would happen to the boat, but I
think she would cheerfully have learnt that the
ressel had been obliged to put back to Newport, on
Account of the storm, or even that it had been
driven ashore at a perfectly safe pla<

Ppople constantly came and went in the waiting-
room, which was sometimes quite full, and again
empty of all but themselves. In the course of
their observations they formed many cordial friend-
ships and bitter enmities upon the ground of per-
sonal appearance, or particulars of dress, with peo-
ple 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 iron-gray hair, who sat
fronting them, and reading all the evening papers,
or \ 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 benevo-
lence of expression, and if they had been friends
of the young man and his family for generations.

12 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and felt bound if any harm befell him to go ana
break the news gently to his parents, their nervea
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 feel-
ing of contempt for his unambitious destination.

They were already as completely cut off from
local associations and sympathies as if they were a
thousand miles and many months away from Bos-
ton. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-
jets as a gust of wind drew through the statioa ;
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 pack-
ages, and the pots of ivy in her windows. " These
poor Bostonians," they said, " have some love of
the beautiful in their rugged natures."

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 sub-
tile interpretation of his uneasiness, "J don't want
anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know the
weaknesses of men ; and you had better go and
jAass the next half-hour over a plate of something
indigestible."

THE OUTSET. 13

This was said con stizza, the least little sugges-
tion of it ; but Basil rose with shameful alacrity.
" Darling, if it 's your wish " —

" It 's my fate, Basil," said Isabel.

— " 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 busi •
ness ; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go
because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps,
or think you may be so before we get to New York.
I shall amuse myself well enough here."

I suppose it is always a little shocking and griev
ous to a wife when she recognizes a rival in butch
era' -meat and the vegetables of the season. With
her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery
and her dainty habits of lunching, she cannot rec-
oncile with the ideal her husband's capacity for
breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at all
hours of the day and night — as they write it on
the sign-boards of barbaric eating-houses. 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 :heir European travels during their first engage-
ment. " 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

14

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

thought T must break with him on account oi the
wild-boar ; and at Heidelberg, the sausage and the
ham! — how could he, in my presence? Bat 1
took him with all his faults, — and was glad to get
him/' she added, ending her meditation with a

&Jf$&

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 be-
came once again mere observers of their kind, more
or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so

THE OUTSET. 15

that individual trails were merged in the character
of multitude. Even then, they could catch glimpse*
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 or
manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The
ticket-seller'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 par-
ticularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off
Ko some place that lay not only in the distance, but
also in the future — to 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 arrive there. Say that
all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive ?

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 Bhe
arranged upon the seat. There the invalid lay
down, and turned towards the crowd a white, suffer-
ing face, which was yet so heavenly meek and
peaceful that it comforted whoever looked at it.

16 iflEIB WEDDING JOURNEY.

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

" What is it like, Isabel ? "

" 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 seta
us free of our every-day hates and desires, our
aims, our fears, ourselves. Maybe a long and mor-
tal sickness migbt come to wear such a face in one
of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret
the poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had
fallen away."

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 un-
known 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 emo-
tion, 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 compas-
sion 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
*nd good she is ! "

They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry ol

THE OUTSET. 17

getting places on the cars, and they never saw her
again. The man at the wicket-gate leading to the
train had thrown it up, and the people were press •
ing furiously through as if their lives hung upon
the chance of instant passage. Basil had secured
Ins ticket for the sleeping-car, and so he and Isabel
atood aside and watched the tumult. When the
rush 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 en-
ables her to do her deep thinking. She little
knows what we poor fellows have to suffer, and
aow often we break down in business hours, and
90b upon one another's necks. Did that old ladv
talk to you in the same strain ? n

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

18 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

was that made me shed those few small tears. She
seemed a very religious person."

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

" All aboard S "

This warning cry saved him from whatever her-
esy he might have been about to utter ; and pres-
ently the train carried them out into the gas-
sprinkled darkness, with an ever-growing speed that
soon left the city lamps far behind. It is a phe-
nomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from
being most impressive, that departure of the night-
express. 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 help-
lessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it
begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of secu-
rity ; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleep*
uig car, and feel yourself hurled forward through
the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you

THE OUTSET. 19

can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only
that you can endure it ; and some such condition
as this, I sur pose, accounts for many heroic facts
in the world. To the fantastic mood which pos
Besses you equally, sleeping or waking, the stop
pages of the train have a weird character ; and
Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford
are rather points in dreain-land than well-knowu
towns of New England. As the train stops you
d iv) wee 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 gas-jets, of clattering feet of pas-
sengers getting on and off ; then of some one, con-
ductor or station-master, 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 blank
vigil or a blank slumber.

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 pub
lie, and I've a fancy for not going to a hotel. Lucy
will be expecting us out there before noon ; and we
san pass the tirafi pleasantlv enough for a few hour*

20

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

just wandering about.

She was a woman who
loved any cheap de-
fiance of custom, and
she had an agreeable
sense of adventure ill
what she proposed. Be-
sides, she felt that noth-
ing could be more in
the unconventional spir-
it in which they meant
to make their whole
journey than a stroll
about New York at half-
past six in the morning.
" Delightful ! " an-
swered 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 Broad-
way at this hour. We
wdll breakfast at one of
those gilded metropol-
itan 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."

THE OUTSET. 21

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 bad 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 brisknoso
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
corner-grocer, 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 tint, —
perhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst
the siege of the hot weather lasted, — now con-
fronted the advancing sunlight, before which the
long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring.
A marketing mother of a family paused at a pro-
vision-store, and looking weakly in at the white-
aproned butcher among his meats and flies, passed
without an effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied
shop-girls tripped by in the draperies that betrayed
their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby ; from
a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those
cool young New Yorkers whom no circumstances
can oppress : breezy- coated, white-linened, clean,

22

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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,

whilat the person sways lightly with the walk ; bu
the street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were
rows of people with baskets between their legs and

THE OUTSET. 28

papers before their faces ; and all showed by some
peculiarity of air or dross 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 thou
sands within doors prolonging, befoie the day's
terror began, the oblivion of sleep.

As thev turned into one of the numerical streets
to cross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet
deeper seclusion, Basil began to utter in a musing
tone : —

"A city against the world's gray Prime,
Lost in some deserf far from Time,
Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
Have only sided sands and dew, —
Yet still a marble hand of man
Lying on all the haunted plan ;
The passions of the human heart
Beating the marble breast cf Art, —
Were not more lone to one who first
Upon its giant silence burst,
Than this strange quiet, where the tide
Of life, upheaved on either side,
Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat
With human waves the Morning Street."

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

24 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

nebulous sweetness the first lines have, and what a
clear, cool light of day-break in the last ! ''

" You could have been as good a poet as that,
Basil," said the ever-personal and concretely-speak-
ing Isabel, who could not look at a mountain with-
out thinking what Basil might have done in thai
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 belike one. But
I've done with it ; 1 broke with the Muse the day
you accepted me. She came into my office, looking
so shabby, — not unlike one of those poor shop-
girls ; and as I was very well dressed from having
just been to see you, why, you know, I felt the dif-
ference. 4 Well, my dear ? ' said I, not quite liking
the look of reproach she was giving me. 'You are
going to leave me,' she answered sadly. 4 Well,
yes ; I suppose I must. You see the insurance busi-
ness is very absorbing ; and besides, it has a bad
appearance, you're coming about so in office hours,
and in those clothes.' ' O,' she moaned out, c you
used to welcome me at all times, out in the country,
and thought me prettily dressed.' 4 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 Christ-
mas and Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I
must draw the line there.' She gave me a look

THE OUTSET. 25

fchat made my heart ache, and went straight to
my desk and took out of a pigeon-hole a lot uf pa-
pers, — 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 hoop-skirt clicking
against each step of the stairway, as she went
slowly and heavily down to the street. "

"O don't — dont, 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 wrhen 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 Morning-Street friend. But see ! the
human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement
with cooks and second-girls."

They were frowzy serving-maids and silent ;
each swept down her own door steps and the pive-
ment in front of her own house, and then knocked
her broom on the curbstone and vanished intc 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

26 THEIR WEDDING IOUKNET.

than one point by the bustling deities of bw^ese •
in such streets the irregular, inspired doctors and
aoctresses come first with inordinate door-plates
then a milliner filling the parlor window with new
bonnets ; here even a publisher had hung his siaD
bes.de a door, through which the feet of youn,
ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children i*
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 boarding-houses or fur-
nished lodgings for gentlemen, and were trying to
h.de ,t. To these belonged the frowzy serving
women; to these the rows of ash-barrel^ in which
the decrepit children and mothers of the streets
were clawing for bits of coal.

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway
here were already some omnibuses beginning yle"r
long day's travel up and down the handsom! t re
some length 0f that avenue ; but for the moS art
t was empty. There was, of course, a hurry of
foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but these were
sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper
™ Stl ' fast asl^P- The waiter at the restaur^
cnto which our friends stepped was so weTaw,
of tins, and so perfectly assured they „ere not a

Z CT^ I™? T f0rW a ** Pat on
age of them, which they did not resent H.

brought Basil what he had ordered ^barba"

abundance, and charged for it with barbaric IpW

THE OUTSET. 27

dor. It is all but impossible not to wish to jtand
well with your waiter : T have myself been often
treated with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet
I have never been able to withhold the dou:enr
that marked me for a gentleman in their eyes, and
entitled me to their dishonorable esteem. Basil
wus not superior to this folly, and left the waUei
nith the conviction that, if he was not a New
Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the world at
ary rate.

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 dinner-pail 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 half-
lemolished 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 ham-
mer on the stone ; overhead swung and threatened
the marble block that the derrick was lifting to its
place. As ynt these forces of demolition and con-
el ruction had the business of the street almost tc
themselves.

" Why, how shabby the street is ! " said Isabel,
at last. " When I landed, after being abroad, I
remember that Broadway impressed me with its
splendor."

28 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

" Ah I but you were merely coming from Eu-
rope then ; and now you arrive from Boston, and
are contrasting this poor Broadway with Washing-
ton 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 in
tensity 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 Europe, because we
hardly expect anything of America then."

" 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

TBE OUTSET. 29

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 his fellows,
he rules a hundred helpless millionaires ! '

Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel
knew nothing about politics, and she felt that she
was getting into deep water ; she answered buoy-
antly, but she was glad to make her weariness the
occasion of hailing a stage, and changing the con
versation. 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 sun-
light, while below, in the shadow that was darker
than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among
their flowers.

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

" Yes, their wedding- journeys 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 the absurdity.

M It 's too early yet for Leonard," continued

80 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Basil ; " what a pity the church-yard is lock 3d 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
't 's historical, and it 's open, — where these drow sy
friends of ours used to take the air when they were
in the fashion, and had some occasion for the ele-
ment in its freshness. You can imagine — it 'a
cheap — how they used to see Mr. Burr and Mr.
Hamilton down there."

All places that fashion has once loved and aban-
doned are very melancholy ; but of all such places,
I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are there
some sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous
and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots ? I
believe so, but I do not make sure ; I am certain
only of the mangy grass-plots, 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 morn-
ing when our friends, with the aimlessness of
strangers who are waiting to do something else,
saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hun-
gry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over
this weedy growth, not playing, but moving list-
lessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of
their costumes. One of these little creatures \f ore,
with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off
best dress of some happier child, a gay little gar-

THE OUTSET. 81

ment cut low in the neck and short in the Bleeves,
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
otmpelled. They abandoned themselves upon tho
green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean
bands 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 boarding-house scale through
various unhomelike occupations to fiual 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 expicss-
wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-look-
ing men. Beyond laughed and danced the fresh
blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and smoke-
stacks

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

82 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

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 hia
young eyes, and how his heart must leap within
him!" '

" Yes, Basil ; it 's all very pleasing, and thank you
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 country as soon as possible."

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 knowl-
edge of Europe made New York the most unin-
teresting 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 rest-
less. They could imagine its being liked by a suc-
•^essful 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

THE OUTSET. 38

poet or scholar, or any woman of wisdom and refine-
ment, 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, home-like London.
And as they twittered their little dispraises, the
giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and
more conscious of herself, waking from her nig] it'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 wedding-
jouineyers swelled the deep tide of life back from
its night-long 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 trains,
and that easily distinguishable class of lately New-
Yorkized 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, well-dressed, 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
t.he 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

3

_

$4 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

anew, till it filled the world in which theie waa
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 new-made 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 you, Eve ? " laughed Basil in intricate ac-
knowledgment of his happiness.

" O no, Adam; we'd look out all the most grace-
ful euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn't
hurt the feelings of a spider."

n.

a midsummer-day's dream.

They bad waited
to see Leonard, in
order that they
might learn better
how to find his
house in the coun-
try ; and now, when
they came in upon
him at nine o'clock,
be welcomed them
with all his friend-
ly heart. Pie 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 down-town
parlor ; but after they had briefly accounted to his

36 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 evening.

They crossed from Broadway to the noisome
street bj the ferry, and in a little while had taken
their places in the train on the thither side or the
water.

" Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, " that Leon-
ard travels fifty miles every day by rail going tc
and from his work ! "

" I must, dearest, if I would be truthful."

" 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 Leonards dwelt.

I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither,
though I do it at the cost of the reader, who sus-
pects 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 re-
turn from Europe and renewal of her engagoment
Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swal-
lowed 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. A na

A midsummer-day's dream. 37

now that they had come together, thei? only talk
was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light
to which husbands could be tuined, and still found
an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leon-
ard beheld in her friend's joy the swett leflection
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 great-grand-
mothers 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 hav-
ing 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
mtclnly the first year than ever they do afterwards,
*nd 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 hei

88 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY.

palms against his, and gave a vehement little push
— " there is something agreeable about it, even at
thiu stage of the proceedings."

" Isabel," said her husband, with severity, " tliii
is bridal ! "

44 No matter ! I only want to seem an old mar-
ried woman to the general public. But the appli-
cation of it is that you must be careful not to con-
tradict me, or cross me in anything, so that wo 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 provoking — at
times."

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 enjoy-
ment of both in their daily existence. The sub-
urbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles
In every direction ; and everywhere are handsome
villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men like him-
self, whom strict study of the time-table enables to
spend all their working hours in the' city and all
\heir smoking and sleeping hours in the country.

The home and the neighborhood of the Leon-

A MIDSUMMER-DAY S DREAM. 39

ards 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 re-
sult than to detain the travellers into the vciy
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 am not sure but there
was something sinful in it.

They had given up their cherished purpose of
going to Albany by the day boat, which was rep-
resented 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 yuu 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."

40

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and ol
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 till the evening boat shou)d
itart.

The.r spirits were low, for the terrible spell ci
the great heat brooded upon them. All abroad
burned the fierce white light of the sun, in whicL
not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but

A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. 41

tne 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 des-
perate 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
<*asp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. 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 Dy the
ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its stifling
darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so
close and dead and mixed 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
coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat
deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.

In a convenient place in the station hung a ther-
mometer, before which every passenger, on going

42 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine, aud
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 might of theii
idols, bowed their souls to the great god Heat.

On the boat they found a place where tin
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 side, 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 ^5yta
gate of iron bars, like a herd of wild animals.
They were streaming with perspiration, and, ac-
cording to their different temperaments, had faces
of deep crimson or deadly pallor.

" Now the question is, my dear," said Basil
when, free of the press, they lingered for a mo-
ment in the shade outside, " whether we had bet-
ter 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
and smells which the other can't offer us, but
whichever we take we shall be sorry."

A midsummer-day's dream. 48

" Then 1 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 ex-
ercised 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
piacticed 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 pur-
suing 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
(he sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We
will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliber-
ate 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 re-
sisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Star-
vation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shore-
ward, 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.

44 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

od one of the hottest days of last year, behold
my obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth
Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment
oi 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, ice-creaming and stag-
ing 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 depart-
ure. She felt that they had yielded sufficiently to
circumstances and conditions already on this jour-
ney, and she was resolved that the present half-day
In New York should be the half-day of her original
design.

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
lankly 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

a midsummer-day's dream. 46

flame-faced 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
onspared 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 horse-car pil-
grimage through that squalid street by the river-side,
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 cen-
tre 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
Bent 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
:heir dream they had fellow-passengers, whose
sufferings made them odious and whom they were
glad to leave behind when they alighted from the

46

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue,
quenched themselves in the shade of the cross

>~:

—s«fc

street. A little strip of shadow lay along the row
of brown-stone fronts, but there were interval*
where the vacant lots cast no shadow. With great

A midsummer-day's dbeam. 47

bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to
avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult tor-
rents 01 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 light-
muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water,
and then they came forth again ; and evermore

" The day increased from heat to heat."

At last they were aware of an end of their vis-
its, and of a purpose to go down town again, and
of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks of
brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brown-
stone nights of steps, and their handsome, intoler-
able 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 down downwards they had kept up a show oi

48 THKItt WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 river-sides, — if indeed it did not
befall in some such high, close-shuttered, 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 mid-
summer battles, and pictured the anguish of ship-
wrecked 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.

A midsummer-day's dream. 49

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 piti-
less 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 wed-
ding-journey ers 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 sum-
mer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a
quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom
of low-hovering 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 lengtL
of the street swept a stream of tormented life.
\\] sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous
among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted
Btages, with quivering horses driven each by a man
who sat in the shade ^f a branching white um<

50 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

brella, and suffered with a moody trueulence ol
aspect, and as if lie harbored the bitterness ol
death in his . heart for the crowding passengers
within, when one of them pulled the strap about
Lis legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of tho
foot-passengers kept to the shady side, and to the
unacustomed eyes of the strangers they were not
less in number than at any other time, though
there were fewer women among them. Indomita-
bly 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 death-
white flabby face, and set down one foot after the
other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. An-
other, 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
Bleep; my heart — " But still the multitude hur-
ried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading,
vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them,
dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out
of them. It was a scene that possessed the be-
holder 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, ard at last their own errands being accom

a midsummer-day's dream. 51

pLshed, 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 in
the nearest place where the soda-fountain sparkled.
It was a vain desire. At the front door of the
apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they en-
tered they heard the next comer cry out with a
maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind,
u Ninety -seven degrees ! " Behind them at the dooi
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, close-clipped
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, half-puzzled looking gentleman who
sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood
beside him, rubbing all over his head a handker-
chief 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
is eminently characteristic of the local life, and as*
lt 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

52 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his pa-

tient, who thereupon tasted something in the glass

A midsummer-day's dfeam. 53

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 soda-
fountain, and I feel that I'm all right 4s long as I
can see that. The people get rather hazy, occa-
sionally, 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
condition of Americans in the face of all embarrass-
ments.

" O, you'll do ! " the apothecary answered, with
a laugh ; but he said, in answer to an anxious ques-
tion from the lady, " He mustn't be moved for an
hour yet," andgayly pestled away at a prescription,
while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded
ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isa-
bel 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 in-
differently at that couple, and evidently forgot them
the next instant? It was dreadful. I ^shouldn't
like to have you sun-struck 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

&4 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousands
of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Le-
vite would be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, 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 sun-stroke. There is such
experience of calamity there that you could hardlj
fall the first victim to any misfortune. Probablj
the gentleman at the apothecary's was merely ex-
hausted 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 ennuyS 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 tender-hearted people would crowd
about so that no breath of air could reach the
victim."

" 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."

44 1 think you are. Nothing is so hard as tc
understand that there are human beings in this

A MIDSUMMER-fA/'S DREAM. 55

world besides one's self and one's set. But let ua
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 midsummer-day'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 'i over,
be have seen the worst."

m.

THE NIGHT BOAT

There is lit-
tle proportion
about either
pain or pleas-
ure : a head-
ache 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 state-room 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 cas-
tellated baron, you have of course been treated with
haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your self-
respect swells with a sense of having escaped posi-
tive insult ; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket
against its gutta-percha number, and you walk uj:

THE NIGHT BOAT. 57

and down the gorgeously carpeted, single-columned,
two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas and
chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic
chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristo-
cratic gloom of the yellow waiters. Your own state-
room as you enter it from time to time is an ever-
new surprise of splendors, a magnificent effect of
amplitude, of. mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains,
and of marble topped wash-stand. In the mere wan-
tonness of an unalloyed prosperity you say to the
saffron nobleman nearest your door, " Bring me a
pitcher of ice-water, quick, please ! " and you do
not find the half-hour that he is gone very long.

If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much
pleasure from these things, then imagine the infinite
comfort of our wedding- journey ers, 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 river-side there
was almost a freshness in the air. They disposed
of their troubling bags and packages ; they com-
plimented the ridiculous princeliness of their state-
room, 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 ap-

58 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

parently the worse for the ordeal they had passed
through, were of a light, conversational temper.

"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
three-story swell-front up pi the South End is no
longer the place for me. Dearest,

"'Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,'

never to leave this Aladdin's-palace-like steamboat,
but spend our lives in perpetual trips up and down
the Hudson."

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 in-
terval between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous
splendor, accommodates our democratic mSnage to
the taste of the richest and most extravagant ple-
beian 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 whu will have lace curtains to the
iteamboat berth into which he gets with his pan-

THE NIGHT BOAT. 59

fcaloons on, and out of which he may be blown by
an exploring 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
Ins 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 good-looking, 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 vulgar, and perhaps vulgarity is not so common
a thing after all.

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 frol-
i ;k<*d it about the house-tops, and in the faces of the
arriving passengers, who, as the moment of depart-
ure drew near, appeared in constantly increasing
nunJjers and in greater variety, with not only the
trepidation of going upon them, but also with the
electrical excitement people feel before a tempest.

60 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 con-
vulsion burst floods of rain, again and again sweep-
ing the promenade-deck where the people sat, and
ilriving 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 trem-
ble away from her moorings and set forth upon her
trip.

" 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 declar-
ing that the scenery of the Hudson is much finer
than that of the Rhine."

Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured
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 cele-
brated 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 theii places with a largely increased com pan
ionship on the deck.

THE NIGHT BOAT.

61

They had already reached that part 01 the river
where the uplands begin, and their course was be-
tween stately walls of rocky steepness, or wooded
blopes, 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 canal -
Doats grappled together, and having an air of cozi-
ness in their adventure upon this strange current
out of their own sluggish waters, drifted out of

6° THEIR WEDDTNG JOURNEY.

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 observa-
tion ; but all the more, therefore, they deeply en-
joyed it without reference to time or place. They
Telt some natural pain when they thought that they
might unwittingly pass the scenes that Irving has
made part of the common dream-land, and they
would fain 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 discover-
ing Sunny-Side 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 voy-
aged or read of voyaging, from the Nile to the Mis-
sissippi. 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 con-
stant 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 nan

THE NIGHT BOAT. 6S

resist. So, whilst the twilight held, wt.ll 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
Btill with lingering glances of self -recognition 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 behold-
ing eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure,
and they understood that theii prosperous love ac-
counted 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 self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity.

" O yes ! " said Basil, in answer to some apos-
trophe to their bliss from Isabel, " it 's the greatest
iinagiuable satisfaction to have lived past certain
things. I always knew that I was not a very hand-
some or otherwise captivating person, but I can re-
member years — now blessedly remote — when I
never could see a young girl without hoping she
would mistake me for something of that sort. 1

64 TKEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

couldn'. help desiring that some fascination of mine,
which li£.J escaped my own analysis, would have
an effect upon her. I dare say all young men are
so. I usu to live for the possible interest I might
inspire in your sex, Isabel. They controlled my
movements, my attitudes ; they forbade me re
pose ; and yet I believe I was no ass, but a toler-
ably 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 peo-
ple to suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful,
or well dressed, and do not care to show off in any
sort of way before them ! "

This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just
sense of their contrast to the group of people near-
est them, — a young man of the second or third
quality and two young girls. The eldest of these
was carrying on a vivacious flirtation with the
young man, who was apparently an acquaintance
jf brief standing ; the other was scarcely more than
a <hild, 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

THE NIGHT BOAT. *>&

neighborhood for beauty and wit. The young man
presently gave himself out as one who, m pursuit
of trade for the dry-goods 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
[or future celebration to their different friends ; and
it had a brilliancy and interest wbich 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 which had
for them all the sensation of repartee.

Young Man. They say that beauty unadorned
is adorned the most.

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

Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don t
believe me, you ask your mother when you get

home.

(Titter from the younger sister.)

Young Woman (scornfully). Umph! my mother
has no control over me!

Young Man. Nobody else has, either, I should

gay. (Admiringly.)

Young Woman. Yes, you've told the truth foi
once, for a wonder. I'm able to take care of my-
self, — perfectly. (Almost hoarse with a sense of
sarcastic performance.)

66

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Young Man. " Whole team and big iog tu»dei
uhe wagon," as they say out West.

Young Woman. Better a big dog than a puppy
4>iy day. rj'

' Aggies and horror from the younger sister, sen-

THE NIGHT BOAT. 67

8ation in the young man, and so much rapture in
the young woman that she' drops the key of her
state-room 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 mur-
mur. Ah ! poor Real Life, which I love, can I
make others share the delight I find in thy foolish
and insipid face ?)

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 toady-
ing to him with the pleasure which all young men
feel in winning the favor of seniors in their voca-
tion. " Well, as I was a-say'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 ani-
mal, — " Isaac'U zell him the goat he wands him
to puy, and he'll make him believe it s the goat
he was a lookin' for. Well, now, that 's well
enough as far as it goes ; but you know and 1
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 tne thing is to nake him puy

68 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 glothing-business in the world! "

" Well," sighed the elder, who filled his arm
chair quite full, and quivered with a comfortable
jelly-like tremor in it, at every pulsation of the en-
gine, " 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 pas-
sengers on other rivers, though they all have feat-
ures in common. There was that man of the sud-
den 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 differ-
ent. They were going to Saratoga, where perhaps
the exigencies of fashion would bring them ac-
quainted, and where the blue blood of a quarter of
a century would be kind to the yesterday's fluid of
warmer Lue. There was something pleasanter in
the face of the hereditary aristocrat, but not so
strong, nor, altogether, so admirable ; particularly

rHE NIGHT BOAT. 69

if you reflected that he really represented nothing
in the world, no great culture, no political influ-
ence, no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary
force, nothing hut a social set, an alien club-1. e, a
tradition of dining. We live in a true fairy laud
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 twice-told tale.
Let us clap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and

^We can be as glad, apparently, and with the
same reason as the poorly dressed young man stand-
ing near beside the guard, whose face Baal and
Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concern
ing 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 pen-
Bive face claimed delicate feeling for him, and a
graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured un-
Lsciously caught flavors of Tennyson and Brown-
ing in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morro
for was it not a story out of mythology, with god*
and heroes of the nineteenth century, that he was
now carrying back from New York with mm ,?
Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-
accepted disappointments a moving little picture

70 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY.

of this poor imagined poet's adventures ; with whai
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 maga-
zines some of the shorter pieces out of the "And
other Poems " which were to have filled up th„
volume. "He's going back rather stunned and
bewildered ; but it 's something to have tasted the

HLw-nt ^ ?aj tUm t0 Sweet ou his Pal^>
at las , Ull he finds himself longing for the tumult

that he abhors now. Poor fellow ! one compas-
sionate cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to
lunch being struck, as we are, with something fine
in bs face. I hope he 's got somebody who believes
m him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more com-
fortable, for the present, if he went over the railing •

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 con
trasts 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 aL

THE NIGHT iiOAT. 7l

these parodies none was so terribly effective as the
two women, who sat in the midst of the compamy,
yet were somehow distinct from the rest. One
wore the deepest black of widowhood, the ither
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 in-
numerable 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 charac-
ters ! Let us be glad the night drops her curtain
upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the
other actors from our view.

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 V>ok
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 delicious feel-
ing of coziness and security to our travellers.

72 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

A few hours later they struggled awake at the
sharp sound of the pilot's bell signaling the engi-
neer to slow the boat. There was a moment of
perfect silence ; then all the drops of the chande-
liers in the saloon clashed musically together ; then
fell another silence ; and at last came wild cries foT
help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses.
" Send out a boat ! " " There was a woman aboard
that steamboat ! " " Lower your boats ! " " Rim 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 state-room window some lights shone faintly
on the water at a distance.

" 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 back in a minute."

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
wlrile before was now utterly estranged. There
was m motion of the boat, and in the momentary
suspense a quiet prevailed, in which those grotesque
shapes of disarray crept noiselessly round whisper-
ing panic-stricken conjectures. There was no rush-
ing to and fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there
was not a man to be seen, for apparently they had

THE NIGHT BOAT.

78

all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the calam-
ity. A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it
was snch a topsy-turvy world that it would have
seemed only another dream-land, 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
flight that made all others friends, and fcr aught
that most knew, in the presence of death itself, these
two moved together shunned and friendless.

Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had be-
come 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 to pick up the
crew of the sunken vessel.

" Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chan-
deliers," said one of the ladies. " Is it such a very
slight matter to run down another boat and sink

it ? " ,

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

tow-boat mi 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 lighted

sleeper on board."

74 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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
arm-chairs and sofas, while others returned to their
rooms. With the latter went Isabel. " Lock rue
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 till daylight.

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 whom he had already found gathered
there.

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 feeblest-minded are sure to lead
the talk. At such times one feels that a sen-
sible frame of mind is unsympathetic, and if ex-
pressed, unpopular, or perhaps njt quite safe; and
Basil, warned by his fate with the ladies, listened
gravely to the voice of the common imbecility and
incoherence.

The principal speaker was a tall person, wearing
a silk travelling-cap. He had a face of stupid

THE NIGHT BOAT. 76

benignity and a self -satisfied 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, a<?
if there would ever be any trial about it. " Now
how did the tow-boat hit us ? "

44 Well, she came bows on."

44 Ah ! bows on," repeated the other, with great
Batisfaction ; and a little murmur of u Bows on ! "
ran round the listening circle.

44 That is," added the witness, 44 it seemed as if
we struck her amidships, and cut her in two, and
3unk her."

44 Just so," continued the examiner, accepting
the explanation, 44 bows on. Now I want to ask
if you saw our captain or any of the crew about ? "

44 Not a soul," said the witness, with the solem-
nity of a man already on oath.

44 That'll do," exclaimed the other. 44 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 couldn't find
either of them high or low."

44 The officers ought all to have been sitting here
on the promenade deck," suggested one ironical
spirit in the crowd, but no one noticed him.

76 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap ncvw
took a chair, and a number of sympathetic listeners
drew their chairs about him, and then Vgan at*
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 con-
cerned ; and the silk-capped 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, gentle-
men, what a little thing, humanly speaking, life de-
pends 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 made up a purse
for the boy, and I wrote a full account of it to the
papers."

" 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 to be ready for whatever happens.'*

The others looked at this speaker with interest,
as one who had invented a safe method of travel.

" I happened to be up to-night, but I almost al-
ways undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my
own house," said the gentleman of the silk cap

THE NIGHT BOAT. 77

" I don't say your way isn't the best, but that 's vaj
way.

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 ! 'r 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 terrible regularity, that utterance of mortal an-
guish.

Basil went again to the forward promenade, and
sat down to see the morning come.

78 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

The boat swiftly ascended the current, and pres-
ently the steeper shores were left behind an 1 the
banks fell away in long upward sloping fields, with
farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visi-
ble 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 pic-
turesque 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.

THE NIGHT BOAT. 79

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 laJ. images that he had in-
vited to mirror themselves in it.

TV.

A DAY 8 RAILROADING.

Happiness
has com-
monly a
good appe-
tite ; and
the thought
of the for-
tun ately
ended ad-
ventures 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 depart-
ure 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 wHhin, where they seemed

a day's railroading. 8j

to have been expected only by the flies. The wait-
ress plainly had not looked for them, and for a time
found theii presence so incredible that she would
uot 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 Bend
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
liot, greasy biscuit, steaming evilly up into the
face when opened, and then soddening into masses
of condensed dyspepsia.

The wedding-journeyers 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 ap-
petite succumbed. By a terrible tour deforce they
swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor in their cups,
and then speculated fantastically upon the charac-
ter 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 hus-
band 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 break-

82 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

fast. I remember the freshness and brightness of
everything on the little tables, — the plates, the
napkins, the gleaming half -bottles of wine. They
3eemed to have been preparing that breakfast foi
ii3 from the beginning of time, and we were hardly
sealed before they served us with great cups of cafS-
au-lait, and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a
delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and po-
tatoes, — such potatoes ! Dear me, how little I ate
of it ! I wish, for once, I'd had your appetite,
Basil ; I do indeed."

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, de-
spite 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 reluc-
tance ; 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 en-
forced a great fact of travelling, — that people who
serve the public are kindly and pleasant in propor-
tion 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
aim 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

A day's railroading. 88

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 delib-
erately rejected the notion of a drawing -room car as
affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and aa
being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel.
Now, in reward, they found themselves quite com-
fortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed
to vie\> the scenery, into which they struck an hour
after leaving the city, with much complacency.
There was sufficient draught through the open win-
dow 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 pic-
turesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I
say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any con-
siderable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and
pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a graz-
ing 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
Btepping 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 tli€

84 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

slopes, and the cozy red farm-houses repose by the
side of their capacious red barns. Truly, there is
do 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 ap and
down the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard 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 lei-
sure 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 red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of Wash-
ington Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden
braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes an at-
titude of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I
have done drinking. In the same easily contented
spirit as I lounge through the barn-yard, if I find
the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do
not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the
elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the
watch-dogs 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 peo-
ple keep bees, and, in the garden full of worthy
pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable world as
hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a
great bed in which the asparagus has gone to sleep
for the season with a dream of delicate ppray hang-

a day's railroading. 80

ing over it. I wait unmolested through the farm-
er's tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous
seat of his voluhle mowing-machine, 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 sav is not
true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hay-
field, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal De-
cide that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you
cannot count only because they are so many. He
never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and
half-shut 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
cook-stove 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 impercepti-
bly down the canal, un vexed by the far-off futuie
of arrival.

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental
pastimes, but 1 am aware that less superficial
Bpirits could not be satisfied with them, and I lo
not pretend that my wedding- journey ers were so,

86 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET.

They cast an absurd poetry over the laudscape
they invited themselves to be reminded of passages
of European travel by it ; and they placed villaa
and castles and palaces upon all the eligible build-
ing-sites. Ashamed of these devices, presently,
Basil patriotically tried to reconstruct the Dutch
and Indian past of the Mohawk Valley, but heie
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 noth-
ing of the barbarous regions beyond the borders
of her native province. She proved a bewilder-
ing labyrinth of error concerning the events which
Basil mentioned ; and she had never even heard of
the massacres by the French and Indians at Sche-
nectady, 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 head-board. So,
failing at last to extract any sentiment from the
scenes without, they turned their faces from the
window, and looked about them for amusement
within the car.

It was in all respects an ordinary earful of hu-
man 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 sin-
cere observer of man will not desire to look upon
lus heroic or occasional phases, but will seek hira in

A day's railroading. 87

his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness,
To me, at any rate, he is at such times very pre-
cious ; 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 re-
fuse to be amused ; and our friends were very will-
ing to be entertained. They delighted in the pre-
cise, thick-fingered 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 wait-
ing for them, or else did not find them, and wan-
dered disconsolately up and down before the coun-
try stations, carpet-bag in hand ; in women who
came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands
with or sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got
s^ats for them, and placed their bags or their ba-
bies 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
Krain did go off with them), and then threw up

88 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

their windows and talked with girl-friendti 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 inacces-
sibly 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 train-boy, who passed through
on his many errands with prize candies, gum-drops,
pop-corn, papers and magazines, and distributed
books and the police journals with a blind impar-
tiality, or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernat-
ural 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 thai
this was not a very well-dressed company, and
would contrast with the people on an express-train
between Boston and New York to no better advan-
tage than these would show beside the average
passengers between London and Paris. And it

A DAY'S railroading. 89

§eems 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 cos-
tume. I speak of the undressful sex alone : woman,
wherever she is, appears in the last attainable ef-
fects of fashion, which are now all but telegraphic
and universal. But most of the passengers here
were men, and they were plainly of the free-and
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, acquaintance-
making way-travellers. In these, the mere coming
aboard seemed to beget an aggressively confidential
nood. 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 wed-
ding-journey ers 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 suffer-
ings ; that they should all appear the luckiest or
the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people

90 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 some 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 some-
what rustic-looking person who had described him-
self as belonging near New York City.

Basil also found diversion in the tender cou-
ples, 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 en-
vious 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,
well-dressed, 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 in-
famous. Before she would allow herself to do such
a thing she would — well, she hardly knew what

A day's railroading. 91

she would not do ; she would have a divorce, at
any rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh ct
it ; and he would make her hate him if he kept on.

From the seat behind their own they were now
made listen its to the history of a ten weeks' ty-
phoid fever, from the moment when the narratoT
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 insen-
sible, and could eat nothing but a little pounded
ice —and his wife — a small woman, too — used 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 his-
tory, 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 a stranger to the his-
torian.

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel
wailed forth in accents of desperation the words,
" O, disgusting ! ,r 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 husband's shoulder.

She confronted his merriment with eyes of
mournful rebuke ; but as she could not find him,
oy the harshest construction, in the least to blame,
she was silent.

92

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

" 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 : 4 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
never contract my powers.* I could dine at the
Albany station, even."

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

A DAY S RAILROADING.

93

itself in abundance, variety, and whole someness.
At the elbow of every famishing passenger stood a
beneficent coal-black 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 me-
nial, for the momet t. From
table to table passed a calm-
ing influence in the person
of the proprietor, who, as
he took his richly earned
money, checked the rismg
fears of the guests by re-
peated 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 vulture-like fashion is, upon every-
thing in reach, remained to eat like Christians ;
and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman,
who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long
the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made
a good dinner in spite of himself.

" O Basil, Basil* " cried Isabel, when the train
was again in motion, " have we really dined once

94 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

more ? Tt seems too good to be true. Cleanliness,
plenty, wholesomeness, civility ! Yes, as you say,
they cannot be civil where they are not just ; hon-
esty and courtesy go together ; and wherever they
give you outrageous things to eat, they add in-
digestible insults. Basil, dear, don't be jealous*
T 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 com-
plete gentleman ! There ought never to be a white
waiter. None but negroes are able to render their
service a pleasure and distinction to you."

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 theii behavior through-
out a wedding journey which certainly had its
trials, than their willingness to make the very best
of whatever would suffer itself to be made any-
thing 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 typicaj
in this respect. I even imagine that ideal readei

A DAY'S RAILROADING. 96

for whom one writes as yawning over these barien
details with the life-like 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 com-
fort of having well dined which now touched the
springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that
they had never so rejoiced in these tender remi-
niscences.

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 drawing-
room 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 old-fashioned car. They reclined in luxury
upon the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs ; they
surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of
the flying-parlor in which they sat, or turned their
contented regard through the broad plate-glass
windows upon the landscape without. They said
that none but Americans or enchanted princes in
the "Arabian Nights" ever travelled in such state ;

96 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and when the stewards of the car came round suo
cessively with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret-
punches, they felt a heightened assurance that they
were either enchanted princes — or Americana.
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
bay.

V.

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.

They knew
none of the ho-
tels in Roches-
ter, and they
had chosen a
certain one in
reliance upon
their hand-
book. When
they named it,
there stepped
— forth a porter

of an incredibly cordial and pleasant countenance,
who took their travelling-bags, 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 Old- World town,
and he some eager historian expecting reward for
his comment upon it. He cast quite a glamour

98 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

over Rochester, so that in passing a bod} of water,
bordered by houses, and overlooked by odd bal-
conies 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 com
parison, and taken with the unhoped-for pictur-
esqueness, 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 pleas-
ant porter's assurance that they would like it, for
everybody liked it ; and it was with a sudden sink-
ing of the heart that Basil beheld presiding over
the register the conventional American hotel clerk.
He was young, he had a neat mustache and well-
brushed hair ; jeweled studs sparkled in his shirt-
front, 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 way-
farer who meekly wrote his name in the register ;
he 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
call-boy, 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 a mighty pooty gul,
any way, Chawley ! "

When I reflect that this was a type of the note)

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.

99

clerk throughout the United States, that behind
unnumbered registers at this moment he is snub-

bing travellers into the dust, and that they are suf-
fering and perpetuating hLn, I am lost in wonder at
the national meekness. Not that I am one to re-

100 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

fuse the humble pie his jeweled fingers offer me.
Abjectly I take my key, and creep off up staira
after the call-boy, and try to give m\self the gen-
teel 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 ques-
tions ; 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 shall not presume upon
your clemency. Come, I also am human ! "

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 after-
noon ; 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 ven-
turing to hope that, as it proved, the handsome
clerk was the sole blemish of the house.

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 101

Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evi-
dences of luxury afforded by all the appointments
of a hotel so far west of Boston, and they both be-
gan 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 flatter-
ing degree ; in fact, the clerk once forgotten, I pro-
test, 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 possibil-
ity of not being found out a most ordinary person.
They were so late in coming to the supper-room,
that they found themselves alone in it. At the door
they had a bow from the head-waiter, who ran be-
fore them and drew out chairs for them at a table,
and signaled waiters to serve them, first laying be-
fore them with a gracious flourish the bill of fare.
A force of servants flocked about them, as if to con-
test the honor of ordering their supper ; one set
upon the table a heaping vase of strawberries an-
other flanked it with flagons of cream, a third ac-
companied it with cates of varied flavor and device ;
a fourth obsequiously smoothed the table-cloth ; 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 tor
steak, for broiled white-fish of the lakes, - noblest
and delicatest of the fish that swim, -for broiled
chicken, for fried potatoes, for muffins, for whatever

102 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY.

the lawless fancy, and ravening appetites of the
wayfarers could suggest, this fifth waiter remained
to tempt them to further excess, and vainly pro-
posed 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 fairy -land, which will vanish presently, and lua\ e
us empty and forlorn ? " plaintively murmured Isa-
bel, as the menial train reappeared, bearing the
supper they had ordered and set it smoking down.

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 because — be-
cause — O, I shall be miserable every moment
we're here ! " she concluded desperately.

She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a
woman with so much broiled white-fish 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 dis-
covered by the register that we are from Boston,
and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection,
and h jraage which the name everywhere commands.

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 105

It 's our fortune to represent for the time being the
intellectual and moral virtue of Boston. This sup-
per is not a tribute to you as a bride, but as a Bos-
tonian."

It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it
served. It kindled the local pride of Isabel to self-
defense, and in the distraction of the effort she for-
got her fear3 ; 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 re-
tire at once, but presently asked if they were from
the West.

Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were
from the East.

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 exist-
ance of much finer things at the East — " for a
am all hotel ? "

They imagined this waiter as new to his station
in life, as perhaps just risen to it from some country

104 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 hi 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 ho-
tel ; one of the best I ever saw, East or West, in
Europe or America."

They rose and left the room, and were bowed out
by the head-waiter.

" How perfectly idyllic ! " cried Isabel. " Is
this Rochester, New York, or is it some vale of
Arcady ? Let 's go out and see."

They walked out into the moonlit city, up and
down streets that seemed very stately and fine,
amidst a glitter of shop-window 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 o\
the houses had gardened spaces about them, from
which stole, like breaths of sweetest and saddest re-

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 106

gret, 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 win-
dow 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 kei
graceful head lifted to look into his ; they saw him
with his arm yet stretched across to the leaves oi
music he had been turning, and his face lowered to

meet her gaze.

" Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there ! r

« 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, once-upon-a-
time was sweet. Pass on ; and let us see what
charm we shall find next in this enchanted city."

» 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 Roches-
terese ? A place of a hundred thousand people, as
we read in our guide, an immense flour interest, a
great railroad entrepdt, an unrivaled nursery trade,
a university, two commercial colleges, three collegi-
ate 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

100 THEIR WEDDTNG JOtTWEY.

pastoral waiters and porters, — 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 Sam Patch met his fate."

%i And who in the world was Sam Patch ?

" 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 in-
vented the saying, 4 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 was
the one thing that could not be done as well as
others."

" 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 Roch-
ester ? Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we're
within ten minutes' walk of them now."

" 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 were here, if you hadn't
happened to think of Sam Patch."

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 107

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief
object of their journey had been to visit the S3ene
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 hill-side 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 "ts 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, but in
this enchanted city it seemed to have a peculiai
fitness.

A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival space
occupied by many tables, each of which was sur-
rounded by a group of clamorous Germans of either
■ex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lagei

108

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

l>cfore them, and slim flasks of Rhenish ; overhead
flamed the gas in globes of varicolored glass ; tT,e

THE ENCHANTED CITY., AND BEYOND. 109

walls were painted like those of such haunts in the
fatherland ; and the wedding-journeyers were fain
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, Kb'nig, 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 ex-
change of joy, arms tossed abroad in wild congrat-
ulation, and health -pouring goblets of beer lifted in
air. Then they stepped into the moonlight again,
and heard only the solemn organ stops of the cata-
ract. Through garden-ground 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
away from the brink of the cataract, and then dea-

110 THEIR WEPDING JOURNEY.

perately 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 multitudi-
nous 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 their feeble little
needs from the cataract's strength.

At last Basil pointed out the table-rock 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 wo get over this absurd reluctance from facts,
till we make the ideal embrace and include the real,
■all we consent to face the music in our simple com-
mon names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jone*

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. Ill

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 illus-
tration. The people we met coming out of this
pavilion were lovers, and they had been here senti-
mentalizing 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 sing-
ing some of their tender German love-songs, — the
tenderest, unearthliest love-songs in the world. At
the same time they did not disdain the matter-of-
fact corporeity in which their sentiment was en-
shrined ; they fed it heartily and abundantly with
the banquet whooe relics we see here."

On a table before them stood a pair of beer-
glasses, in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the
foam of the generous liquor lately brimmiug them ;
some olxreds of sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese,
bits of cold ham, crusts of bread, and the ashes of
a pipe.

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 cont/ary, I've no doubt
that he fficalled 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.

112

THEIR WEDDING JOURNET.

u * In the Bierhausgarten I linger
By the Falls of the Genesee :
From the Table-Rock in the middl*
Leaps a figure bold and free.

*• Aloof in the air it rises

O'er the rush, the plunge, the death ;
On the thronging banks of the river
There is neither pulse nor breath.

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 118

'* ' Forever it hovers and poises
Aloof in the moonlit air ;
As light as mist from the rapids,
As heavy as nightmare.

" ' In anguish I cry to the people,
The long-since vanished hosts ;
I see them stretch forth in answer,
The helpless hands of ghosts/

1 once met the poet who wrote this. He drank too
much beer."

" 1 don't see that he got in the name of Sam
Patch, after all," said Isabel.

" O yes, he did ; but I had to yield to our taste,
and where he said, * Springt der Sam Patsch kiihn
und frei,' I made it 4 Leaps a figure bold and
free.' "

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 odorous crumbs of Limburger cheese.
They both wore a pensive air.

The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the
whole earth was gone with the moonlight. By nine
o'clock, when the wedding- journey ers 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 Albary, and had an air of a.1-

8

114 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY.

most couscious shabbiness, griminess, and over-use.
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 con-
ductor 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, shrill-voiced, highly dressed, much-
bedizened 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 quarre
enough, but it won no sort of favor ; and when th«

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 115

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 complimen-
tary, I must say," there was no sign of relief or
other acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that
there had been a quarrel.

There was a little more interest taken in the mis-
fortune of an old purblind German and his son,
who were found by the conductor to be a few hun-
dred miles out of the direct course to their destina-
tion, and were with some trouble and the aid of an
Americanized fellow-countryman 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 train-boy on his round %
bestrewing the passengers successively with papers,
magazines, fine-cut 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 Amer-
ican 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 train-boy came back, and metallically, like
a part of the machinery, demanded, " Ten cents ! "
The German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated,
M Tei_ cents ! ten cents ! " with tiresome patience,
while the other passengers smiled. When it had
passed through the alien's nead that he was to pay
for this national gift and he took with his tremulous
fingers from the recesses of his pocket-book a ten-

116 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

cent note and handed it to his tormentor, 3ome of
the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and
Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other with
eye? of mutual reproach.

" Well, upon my word, my dear," he said, " I
Lin: k 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 are ! Whom have
I married ? A woman with neither heart nor
brain ! "

" O Basil, dear, pay him back the money — do."
" 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
IheYuselves with several hours' time on their hands
before the train started for Niagara, and in the first
moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into say*

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 117

ing, " Don't you think we'd have done better to go
directly from Rochester to the Falls, instead of com-
ing this way ? "

" Why certainly. I didn't propose coming this
way."

" I know it, dear. I was only asking," said Isa-
bel, meekly. " But I should think you'd have gen-
erosity enough to take a little of the blame, when 1
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 re-
solved to draw near the great cataract by no other
route.

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the
weather or his hard-heartedness. The sigh touched
him, and he suggested a carriage-ride 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 sea-port, without the ug-
liness 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

118 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY

line between sharper than that which divides drowa
ing from dreaming. But the color was the most
charming thing, that delicate blue of the lake,
without the depth of the sea-blue, but infinitely
softer and lovelier. The nearer expanses rippled
with dainty waves, silver and lucent ; the further
levels made, with the sun-dimmed summer sky, a
vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the
white sails of ships, and stained by the smoke of
steamers.

" 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 isl-
ands, 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 aw-
fulness to be revealed.

n.

NIAGARA.

A s the train stopped,
Isabel's heart beat
with a child-like ex-
ultation, 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 cata-
ract, 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 ar-
rival 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 pri-
vate houses makes the hotels look so vast, or the

120 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 accommoda-
tions of the smallest. They were the sole occu-
pants of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed
to be received at their hotel with a burst of min-
strelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt
that a single stringed instrument of some timid
note would have been enough ; and Basil was go-
ing to express his own modest preference for a
Jew's-harp, 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 por-
tico of the hotel. A small family dismounted, and
the feet of the last had hardly touched the pave-
ment when the music again ended as abruptly a3
those flourishes of trumpets that usher player-kings
upon the stage. Isabel could not help laugl ing 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 call-
boys. Apparently there were not many people
stopping at this hotel, or else they were all out

NIAGARA. 121

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 t he
pleasant quarters assigned them. There was time
before supper for a glance at the cataract, and af tei
a brief toilet they sallied out again upon the hol-
iday street, with its parade of gay little shops, and
thence passed into the grove beside the Falls, enjoy-
ing at every instant their f eeling of arrival at a sub-
lime 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 fan-
tasy. 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 insignificance.

Our friends were beset of course by many car-
riage-drivers, whom they repelled with the kindly
firmness of experienced travel. Isabel even felt a
compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Ni-
agara so much as to have forgotten that the first
time one must see it alone or only with the next of
friendsh.js She was voluble in her pity of Basil
that it was not as new to him as to her, till be-
tween the trees they saw a white cloud of spray,
•hot through and through with sunset, rising, rising,

V22

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten
down by the diapason of the cataract.

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 glance
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 re-
sults 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 litt'e in-
stant, 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

NIAGARA. 12a

American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which
showed diinly through its veil of golden and silver
mists the emerald wall of the great Horse-Shoe.
" How still it is! ,r she said, amidst the roar that
mook 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 pro-
digious 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 affec-
tation and convention. In the vulgar reaction from
this, you are of course as trivial, if you like, at
Niagara, as anywhere.

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 strug-
gle ;d 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 pic-
nic parly of rude, silly folks of the neighborhood,
•uid she stood pondering them in sad wonder if
anything could be worse, when she heard a voi >e

124 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

saying to Basil, " Take yon next. Sir ? Plenty of
light yet, and the wind 's down the river, so the
spray won't interfere. Make a capital picture of
yon ; falls in the background."" It was the loca1
photographer urging them to succeed the young
couple he had just posed at the brink : the gentle-
man 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 photograph.

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trust-
ing as usual to his sympathy for perception of her
train of thought, " Well, I'll never try to be high-
strung again. But shouldn't you have thought,
dearest, that 1 might expect to be high-strung with
success at Niagara if anywhere ? " She passively
followed him into the long, queer, downward-slop-
ing 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 hus-
bands were helping over the sharp and slippery

NIAGARA.

125

rocks, so bare beyond the spray, so green and
•nossy within the fall of mist. But in another

126 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

breath she forgot them, as she looked on that diz-
zied sea, hurling itself from the high summit in
huge white knots, and breaks and masses, ard
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
Bound, 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 pal-
ter with the things perceived. The eye could no
longer take truthful note of quality, and now be-
held the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of carven
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 to-
gether ; 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 filled it, and whether it were

NIAGARA. 127

great or little ; the prevailing softness of the cata-
ract's tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of pro-
digious 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 appreciated the depth of sound that involved
them.

" I think v du might have been high-strung there,
for a second or two," said Basil, when, ascending
the incline, he could make himself heard. " We
will try the bridge next."

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and
delicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls the|
have in late years woven a web of wire high in air
and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. 0\
all the bridges made with hands it seems the light-
est, 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 Ni-
agara, and to show the traveller the vast spec-
tacle, from the beginning of the American Fall to
the farthest limit of the Horse-Shoe, 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
[iath that led through another of those groves
which keep the village back from the shores of the

128

THEIR WEDDJNG JOURNEY.

river on the American side, and greatly help the
Bight-seer'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 ; and 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 afterwards, at least, they
would not have had their airy path seem more
secure.

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
pky 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, swiftljr up-
ward, like troops of pale, transparent ghosts; while
a perfectly clear radiance, better than any other
eor local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under
Ibe bridge the river smoothly swam, the undercur
rents forever unfolding themselves upon the surface
with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all round
with faint lines of white, where the air that filled
the water freed itself in foam. What had beec

NIAGARA. 12B

clear green on the face of the cataract was here
more like rich verd-autique, and had a look of
6rmne» 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
abrupt.y from the water's brink, and shagged with
pine and cedar, displayed the tender verdure of
grass and bushes intermingled with the dark ever-
greens that climb from ledge to ledge, till they
point their speary tops above the crest of bluffs.
In front, where, tumbled rocks and expanses of
naked 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 Horse-Shoe, 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 be-
tween their heavily wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not
how long, in rapture on the sight ; and then, look-
ing back from the shore to the spot where they had
atood, they felt relieved that unreality should pos-
sess itself of all, and that the bridge should smug
there in mid-air like a filmy web, scarce more pass-
able than the rainbow that flings its arch above th,

^On the portico of the hotel they found half .

130 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

f»core of gentlemen smoking, and creating togethei
that collective silence which passes for sociality on
our continent. Some carriages stood before the
&>or, and within, around the base of a pillar, sat a
Hrcle of idle call-boys. There were a few trunks
heaped together in one place, with a porter stand-
ing guard oyer them ; a solitary guest was buying
a cigar at the newspaper stand in one corner ;
another friendless creature was writing a letter
in the reading-room ; the clerk, in a seersucker
coat and a lavish shirt-bosom, tried to give the
whole an effect of watering-place gayety and bus-
tle, as he provided a newly arrived guest with a
room.

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 marble-topped centre-
table, with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small
company of goblets, they sat down perfectly con-
tent in & secluded window-seat. They were not
leen 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 inappropriate to your gorgeous array than the
lupper-room, even."

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for so

NIAGARA 131

rial conquest, in some kind of airy evening-dress,
and was looking round with bewilderment upon
that forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery.
She owned, with a smile, that she had not seen bo
much of the world yet as she had been promised ;
but she liked Niagara very much, and perhaps they
ahould find the world at breakfast.

" 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
thronged the whole summer long. How do you
account for it, Richard ? "

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-
continued discussion elsewhere of the matter in
hand, and he said that he had not been trying to
account for it.

" 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 some interest in the matter ? "

" Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Ni-
agara in the most satisfactory way, it wouldn't
*dd a soiil to the floating population. Under the
circumstances I prefer to leave it unexplained."

14 Do you think it 's because it 's such a hot sum-
mer ? Do you suppose it 's not exactly the season ?
Didn't you expect there'd be more people ? Per-
laps Niagara isn't as fashionable as it used to be."

132 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

4 4.

It looks something like that."

u Well, what under the sun do you think it th*
reason ? "

" I don't know.'

u 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."

" Well," said Richard, " I wanted you to go
there."

" But you said that you always heard this was
tha most fashionable."

" 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.

" Yes, and start at the sound of our own," added
the other lady, helplessly.

" Come now, Fanny," said the gentleman, who
was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker.
M You know you insisted, against all I could say or
tio, upon coming to this house ; I implored you to
go to the other, and now you blame me for bring-
ing you here."

" So I do. If you'd let me have my own way
without opposition about coming here, I dare gay I
ihould have gone to the other place. But ne\ei

NIAGARA. 133

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 anything about the other hotel, and
perhaps it was just as empty as this.

" 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 us ? "

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 few cuffs and collars ! I certainly never
heard of anything so absurd before ! "

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 to-night, please. It 's too ridiculous
Kitty ! " she called out, and, as the young lady
drew near, she continued, " How would you like to
go tc Quebec, with us ? "

" O Fanny ! " cried Kitty, with rapture ; and
then, with dismay, " How can I ? "

" Why, very well, I think. You've got this
dress, and your travelling-suit ; and I can lend yon
whatever you want. Come ! " she added joyously,
u let 's go up to your room, and talk it over ! "

134 THEIR WINDING JOURNEY.

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and
the gentleman followed. To their own relief the
guiltless eaves-droppers, who found no moment
favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy
began, issued from their retiracy.

" What a remarkable little lady ! " said Basil
eaget-ly turning to Isabel for sympathy in his er
joyment of her inconsequence.

" Yes, poor thing ! " returned his wife ; fct it 's no
light matter to invite a young lady to take a jour-
ney with you, and promise her all sorts of gayety,
and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find
her on your hands in a desolation like this. It 'a
dreadful, I think."

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 things."

" And you didn't observe anything peculiar in
her way of reaching her conclusions ? "

" Peculiar ? What do you mean ? "

11 Why, her blaming her husband for letting hei
have her own way about the hotel ; and her telling
him not to mention his proposal to Kitty, and then
doing it herself, just after she'd pronounced it ab-
surd and impossible." He spoke with heat at being
forced to make what he thought a needless explana-
tion.

NIAGARA. 135

" 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 wc man-
kind in the woman of his choice, and made no an-
swer, But to his own soul he said : " I suppose*! J
had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance. It
seems I have been flattering myself."

The next morning they went out as they bad
planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after an
early breakfast. As they sauntered through the
village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in archi-
tecture, they praisefully took in the unalloyed hol-
iday character of the place, enjoying equally the
lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers and
their carriages to let, and the little shops, witfc.
Dothing but mementos of Niagara, and Indian bead-
work, and other trumpery, to sell. Shops so use-
less, they agreed, could not be found outside the
Palais Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or any-
where else in the world but here. They felt them-
selves once more a part of the tide of mere sight-see-
ing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in
other days, and in an eddy of which their love it-
self had opened its white blossom, and lily-like
dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of
newly wedded bliss, which, involving the whole
land du rinse the season of bridal -tours, may be said

136 ' THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costlj
jewel of a precious ring. The place is, in faot,
almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one
out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien
there, an J. must discern a certain immodesty in his
intrusion. Is it for his profane eyes to look upon
all that blushing and trembling joy ? A man o:
any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bow-
ing his excuses to the collective rapture, take the
Grst 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
travelling-shawl 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
skirto ! What is Niagara to these things ?

NIAGARA. 187

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sister-
hood to these blessed souls ; but she secretly re-
joiced 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 watck -chain
in speaking to him ; she trusted that she might be
preserved from putting her face very close to bis
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 not the less to be praised for having
formed them.

Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Isl-
and, 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,
Bmiling sphinx-like over their laps full of bead -work,
and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation
upon the passers. They wore bright kirtles, and
red shawls fell from their heads o\er their phimp
brown cheeks and down their comfortable persons.
A little girl with them was attired in like gaye'y
of color. " What is her name ? " asked Isabel,

138

THEIR WEDDirK<; JOURNEY.

paying for a bead pincushion. " Daisy Smith,'
said her mother, in distressingly good English.
"But her Indian name?" "She has none," an-
swered 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 con-
soling ; but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and
it could have been wished that he had not a silk
bat on.

41 Still," said Isabel, as they turned away, " I'm
glad he hasn't Lisle-thread gloves, like that chief-
tain 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 increasing.
They ought to be fading away."

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 suif,
the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the
fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of
sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the de&th-
ful 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
«rildness they sought refuge from the sight and
sound.

NIAGARA. 189

There had been rain in the night ; the air was
full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of
twittering birds. Presently they came to a bench
Bet 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 youth — the rhyme of some poor news-
paper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying
his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clip-
ping his name from the bottom. It had always
lingered in Basil's memory, rather from the inter-
est of the awful fact it recorded, than from any
merit of its own ; and now he recalled it with a
distinctness that surprised him.

AVERT.
I.

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 eyct,

Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and nui

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 1

Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.

140 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

ii.

Under tf»3 weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,
Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wonnd,
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 0, build it strong and stanch,
And to the lines and the treacherous rv>cks look well as you launci
Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprent 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 be scarce can keep !
No ! through all peril unharmed, it reaches him harmless at last
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 o". 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 clings.

in.

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 wav«

Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife

Struggles to help his helpers, anu^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 bridge through the rapids has safely parsed

IV.

Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can «tay
Maddening against the gate that is locked athwart his way.

NIAGARA. 141

* No ! we keep the bridge for them that can help him You,

Tell us, who are you ? " " His brother! " " God help you both 1

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 feaT,
Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near, —
Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and hulled
Headlong on to the cataract's brink, and out of the world.

" O Basil ! " said Isabel, with a long sigh break-
ing the hush that best praised the unknown poet's
skill, " it isnt true, is it ? "

" Every word, almost, even to the brother's com-
ing at the last moment. It 's a very well-known
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 over-
arching the falls. Its beauty is relieved against an
historical background as gloomy as the lightest-
Hearted tourist could desire. The abominable sav-
ages, 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

142 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

hundred years ago ; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily
driving out these squalid devil-worshippers ; 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 con-
spiracy ;>f 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 Rev-
olution 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 sav-
age forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, 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 mist-veiled 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 mar-
tyrdom, — and then, lacking this light, turned upon

NIAGARA. 148

ihem the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. 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 ex-
ercised 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 igno-
ble, 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, and who actually laid
the corner-stone of the new temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place vis-
ited by so many thousands every year. The shrub-
bery 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 tte village and the hotels
should be so full, and that the wilderness should

144 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

also abound in them ; yet on every embowered
seat, and going to and from all points of interest
and danger, were these new- wedded 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 rap-
ids ; 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 fore-
ground of every famous American landscape ; and
when I think of the amount of public love-making
in the season of pleasure-travel, 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 nine-
teenth century is the golden age, and that we want
very little of being a nation of shepherds and shep-
herdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Cana-
dian rapids, having traversed the island by a path
through the heart of the woods, and now drew
slowly neai the Falls again. All parts of the pro-
digious pageant have an eternal novelty, and they
beheld the ever- varying effect of that constant sub-
limity with the sense of discoverers, or rather oi
people whose great fortune it is to see the marve-

NIAGARA. 146

in its beginning, and new from the creating Hand.
The morning hour lent its sunny charm to thi3 illu-
sior , while in the cavernous precipices of the shores,
dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval
night seemed to linger. There was a wild flutter-
ing of their nerves, a rapture with an under- con-
sciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and es-
cape, when they came to the three little isles that
extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far
out into the furious channel. Three pretty suspen-
sion-bridges connect them now with the larger isl
and, 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 vine-tangled woods, planted
upon masses of rock ; but they are part of the fas-
cination of Niagara which no one resists ; nor could
Isabel have been persuaded from exploring them.
It wants no courage to do this, but merely submis-
sion 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 3rossed 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
8t niggle. The exertion told heavily upon her
Btrenp^h unawares, and she suddenly made Basil

10

146 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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

NIAGARA. *'*"

never go back on those bridges ; they were not safe
He stared at her cowering form in blank an.aze, and
put his hands in his pockets. Then it occurred to
his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke ; and
he said, " Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat

« 0 do, Basil, do, have me taken off m a boat .
implored Isabel. "You see^ yourself the bridge.,
are not safe. Do get a boat."

»Or a balloon," he suggested, humormg the

Pl kaben burst into tears ; and now he went on his
knees at her side, and took her hands in his. 'Isa-
bel ! Isabel ! Are yon crazy ? " he cried, as if he
meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shud-
dered 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 can go back
by the bridges, never."

" But what do you propose to do ?

« I don't know, I don't know ! "

He would try sarcasm. » Do you intend to *et

up a hermitage here, and have your meals sent out

from the hotel ? It 's a charming spot, and visited

prettv constantly ; but it 's small, even for a hermi-

tage."

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her
eyes, and wondered that he was not ashamed to

maki- tun of her.

H. would try kindness. "Perhaps, darling,

vou'll let me carry you ashore."

*

148 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

" No, that will bring double the weight on the
bridge at once."

" Couldn't you shut your eyes, and let me lead
you ? "

" Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids," she said,
looking up fiercely. « The bridges are not safe.
I'm not a child, Basil. O, what shall we do ? "

kt 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 hav-
ing probably overwrought Isabel's nerves by re-
peating that poem about Avery, and by the ensu-
ing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to
enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it ; and
Bhe 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
answer, and he lost his patience.

" Isabel," he cried, " I'm ashamed of you ! "
" Don't say anything you'll be sorry for after-
wards, Basil," she replied, with the foibearance of
those who have reason and justice on their side.

The rapids beat and shouted round their little
prison-isle, each billow leaping as if possessed by a
separate demon. The absurd horror of the situa-
tion ovei whelmed him. He dared not attempt to
carry her ashore, for she might spring from hia
grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to
call for help ; and what if nobody came till she lost

NIAGARA. 149

her mind from terror ? Or, what if somebody
should come and find them in that ridiculous afflic-
tion ?

Somebody was coming !

" 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 con-
vulsively through his, and walked ashore without a
word.

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 sovereign
against it ? "

" Why, dearest ! Don't you understand ? That
Mrs. Richard — whoever 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 overhang-
Jig the shore below, and warning people that they
descend at their peril. Isabel declined to visit the

150 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but
was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower.
fc* 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 oi
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 Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Cen-
tral 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 Ca-
nadian 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
ong enough in this way, clambered up on the plank

NIAGARA.

151

bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time,
made bold to say that he thought the dWers.or. »

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

152 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

examined his head, and told him he had equilib-
rium 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,
middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly ex
pressed some inward festivity, and had a certain
reluctant fashionableness. " Well, this is my third
bridal tour to Niagara, and wife 's been here once
before on the same business. We see a good man}
changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with tnt-
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 guar-
dian spirits of those who gave the place so many
sad yet pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table
next Basil's, and they were all now talking cheer-
fully over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall.

" Well, Kitty," the married lady was saying,
" you can tell the girls what you please about the
gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'll
believe anything sooner than the truth."

" O yes, indeed," said Kitty, " I've got a good
deal of it made up already. Til 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 flir-
tation with the gentleman of the long blond mus-
tache, whom we met on the bridge this "morning

NIAGARA.

153

and he 's got to do duty in accounting for my miss-
ing 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 aristocratic Southerners, waited upou
by their black servants."

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom
Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo

/ I

as a Southerner probably coming North for the
first time since the war. He had an air at onc€
fierce and sad, and a half -barbaric, homicidal gen-
tility of manner fascinating enough in its way.
lie sat with his wife at a table farther down the
room, and their child was served in part by a little
tan -colored nurse-maid. The fact did not quite
answer to the young lady's description of it, and
yet it certainly afforded her a ground- work. Basil

154 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner,
and explained it upon the theory that he used to
come every year to Niagara before the war, and
was now puzzled to find it so changed.

*v 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 outnourish the re-
mains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry
they produce. The impoverished slave-holder 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 pres-
ence. 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 rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bul-
lied the whole busy civilization of the North.
Everybody who had merchandise or principles to
Bell truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a
tri'imphal 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 Abo-
litionist from the cradle, to sigh over their fate.
After all, they had noble traits, and it was nc

NIAGARA. 156

great wonder they got to despise us, seeing what
most of ns 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
towards him. I dare say he admires him im-
mensely."

There were not above a dozen other people in
the 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 9 They gave us a
very small allowance of brass band when we ar-
rived, 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 din-
ing-room, 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 cat-
aract as a demon ; and another subtle spell (not to
be broken even by the business-like composure of

156 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to
those successive sorceries by which Niagara grad-
ually 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 this
drive whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe,
and behold its three massive walls of sea rounding
and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone,
and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy.

Would they not go to the battle-field 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
ot 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 militia-man, who
had helped his countrymen to be beaten in the
fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelli-
gible 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 reveiy
until he came to an end. It was hard to remem-
ber, that sweet summer morning, when the sun
shone, and the birds sang, and the music of a pianc
and a girl's voice rose from a bowery cottage near,
that all the pure air had once been tainted with
battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been

NIAGARA. 157

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 beauti-
ful land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and
at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village.
The battle of the past seemed only a vagary oi
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 utter-
ance that morning. My driver explained after-
wards, that persons visiting the field were com-
monly so much pleased with the captain's eloquence,
that they kept the noble old soldier in a brandy-
and-water rapture throughout the season, thereby
greatly refreshing his memory, and making the bat-
tle 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 'a
the Bridal Veil ; and I suppose you think the
stream, which is making such a fine display, yon-
der, is some idle brooklet, ending a long course of
error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge.
Tt 's nothing of the kind ; it 's an honest hydraulic
canal, of the most straightfoi*ward character, a poor
out respectable mill-race which has devoted itself

158 THEIIc WEDDING JOURNEY.

Btrietly to business, and has turned mill-wheels in-
stead of fooling round water-lilies. It can affi.rd
that ultimate finery. What you behold in the
Brida Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry."

ki What I can't help thinking of," said Isabel,
who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal
Veil, or anything about it, u is the awfulnes3 of
stepping off these places in the night-time." She
referred to the road which, next the precipice, is un-
guarded by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong
wall would secure it, but we manage things differ-
ently on our continent, and carriages go ruining
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 to-morrow morning.
It 's late for it to-day, 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 not disuse.

u I'm not afraid," she sighed, " but in the words
of the retreating soldier, * I'm awfully demoral-
ized ' ; " and added, " You know we must reserve
some of the vital forces for shopping this even-
ing-"

Part of their business also was to buy the tickete
Cor their return to Boston by way of Montreal and
Quebec, and it was part of their pleasure to get
these of the heartiest imaginable ticket-agent. He
was a colonel or at least a major, and he made ■

NIAGARA. 159

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 watering-place, in
contact with rich money -spending, pleasure-taking
people, who formed his whole jovial world. The
Colonel, who included them in this world, and there-
by bre vetted them rich and fashionable, could not
secure a state-room for them on the boat, — a per-
fectly 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 par-
ticular 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 lie was privileged by a document which was no
iouht part of every such transaction. He spoke in
a loud cheerful voice ; he laughed jollily at no appar-
ent joke ; he bowed very low and said, " Good-
evening ! " at parting, and they went away as if he
had blessed them.

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering

160

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixt»
lire of quaintness and commonplaceness ; in hanging
about the shop-windows with their monotonous va-
riety of feather fans, — each with a violently red or
yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, — moc
casons, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches,
bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art
of the neighboring squaws can invent ; in saunter-
ing 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 geolog-
ical formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by
the heat of the gas-lights 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 magnifi-
cent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue,
with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre.
WTien he triumphantly displayed it in their room,
" Who 's that for, Basil ? " demanded his wife ; " the
cook ? n But seeing his ghastly look at this, she
fell upon his neck, crying, " O you poor old taste-
Less darling ! You've got it for we / " and seemed
about to die of laughter.

"Didn't you start and throw up your hands,

NIAGARA. 161

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
iolors ? O Basil, dearest ! You are incorrigible
Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the
Lues that the perverseness of man has invented in
defiance of nature ? Now, my love, just promise
me one thing," she said pathetically. " We'ie go-
ing 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 truli/ surprised and pleased."

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he
murmured something about exchanging it. "No,"
Bhe said, "we'll keep it as a — a — monument."
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 ita
barbaric brightness than for its beauty. She would
not let him get angry, and he could say nothing

162 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

against the half -ironical petting with whvh sba
soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the nigr c, and the
uext morning they spent a charming hour r,bout
Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat island,
somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place
on whose wonders they had so hungrily and indis-
criminately feasted at first. They had already the
feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily mar-
veled at the greed with which newer-comers 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 words to express their con-
tempt.

Then they made their excursion to the Whirl-
pool, mistakenly going down on the American side,
for it is much better seen from the other, though
teen from any point it is the most impressive feature
of the whole prodigious spectacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland
yeas 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 under-currents boiling beneath the
•urface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from this

NIAGARA. 168

scene of secret power, so different fVcm the thun-
derous 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 crests
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 rrvei
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
Burges a travesty of life, apparently floating there
at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid the
waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the
ieath that has long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the rail-
way 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
i>f the rapids on their own level. From the clifl
opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure of pine

164

THETR WEDDING TOURNEY.

sticks, but is doubtleai
stronger than it looks
and at any rate, as it has
never yet fallen to pieces,
it may be pronounced per-
fectly safe.

In the waiting-room 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 struc-
ture, where it was dark-
ened by a rough weather-
boarding, 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 elevator.
An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead
mingled in Isabel's heart with a doubt of the ?alu«

NIAGARA. 165

uf the scene below, and she could rot look forward
to escape from her present perils by the conveyance
which had brought her into them, with any satis-
faction. She wanly smiled, and shrank closer to
Basil ; while the other matron made nothing of
seizing her husband violently by the arm and im-
ploring him to stop it whenever they experienced a
rougher jolt than usual.

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
»rest. 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
^ealfl like an alien presence there, or as if he had

166 THEIR WEDDING Jv/URNEY.

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 ele-
vator, it is well to have it of the most transitorj
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 offensiveness by
their beauty and unreality.

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 wait-
ing-room at the top, " What I like about these
little adventures," said Mr. Richard to Basil, ab-
ruptly, " is getting safely out of them. Good-morn-
ing, sir." He bowed slightly to Isabel, who re-
turned his politeness, and exchanged faint nods, or
glances, with the ladies. They got into their sepa-
rate carriages, and at that safe distance made each
other more decided obeisances.

" Well," observed Basil, " I suppose we're intro-
duced now. We shall be meeting them from time
co 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 (if
them."

NIAGARA. 161

M Yes," said Isabel, as if continuing his train oJ
thought, " I'm glad we're going to-day."

" O dearest ! "

" 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
%i 1 anger and dreadfuller. Somehow it 's begun tc
pervade me and possess me in a very uncomfortable
way ; I'm tossed upon rapids, and flung from cat-
aract 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
lord ! "

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 exist-
ence of the Supreme Being. But after a while we
are aware of some potent influence undermining our
Belf -satisfaction ; we begin to conjecture that the
great cataract does not exist by virtue of our ap-
proval, and to feel that it will not cease when \*e
go away. The second day makes us its abject
Blaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in
terror. I believe some people stay for weeks, how-

168 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

ever, and hordes of them have written odes to Niag-

ara."

" I can't understand it, at all," said Isabel. " I
don't wonder now that the town should be so empty
tli is 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
30 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 to-
day. I'm sorry we went out on the Three Weird
Sisters. O, I shall dream about it ! and the rush,
and the whirl, and the dampness in one's face, and
the everlasting chir-r-r-r-r of everything ! "

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a mo-
ment's oblivion, and then rose radiant with a ques-
tion : " 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 subjected by it."

" But we're dispersed and subjected."

" Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who
knows how it would be if you were nineteen instead
of '; wenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turned
of thirty ? "

" Basil, you're very cruel."

M No, no. But don't vou see how it is ? We'v«

NIAGARA. 169

known too much of life to desire any gluomy oack-
ground for our happiness. We're quite contented
to have things gay and bright about us. Once wo
wouldn't have made the circle dark enough Well,
my dear, that 's the effect of age. We're superan
una ted."

" I used to think /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 re-
placed it, flattering himself that he had delicately
seized this chance of an unavowed caress and not"
knowing (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 in this
world, and which I hope they will not forget in the
next.

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 travel-
ling-dress ; two occupied the parlor as they passed
out ; half a dozen happy pairs arrived (to the
music of the band) in the omnibus that ^as to
carry our friends back to the station ; they caught
Bight of several about the shop windows, as they

170 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

drove through the streets. Thus the place perpet-
ually 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 ia
a great charm in Niagara. I think with tender-
ness 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 heart-
break : but here only youth, faith, rapture. I kiss
my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I
were a poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood to-
wards 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 mis
creant hackmen on the streets, but always to order
their carriage at the office ; on the street the hack-
men whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant
drivers in league with the landlords ; yet their
actual experience was great reasonableness and
facile contentment with the sum agreed upon.

NIAGARA. 171

This may have been because the hackmen so far
outnumbered the visitors, that the latter could dic-
tate 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. Yet eveu
he may have been a benevolent natui? unjustly
nuspected.

vn

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were
to take the
Canadian
steamer at
Charlotte,
the port of
Rochester,
and they
rattled un-
eventfully down from Niagara by rail. At the
broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay
beside the railroad station ; and while Isabel dis-
posed of herself on board, Basil looked to the trans-
fer 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
bis 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

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 178

mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white Amer-
icans, 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 Cana-
dian purser showed when they all wedged them-
selves in about his window to receive their state-
room 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 jack-in-office would
have done.

Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer,
which was very comfortable, and in every way suf-
ficient for its purpose, with a visible captain, who
answered two or three questions very pleasantly,
and bore himself towards his passengers in some
sort like a host.

In the saloon Isabel had found among the pas-
sengers her semi-acquaintances of the hotel parlor
and the Rapids-elevator, and had glanced tenta-
tively towards them. Whereupon the matron of
the party had made advances that ended in their
all sitting down together and wondering when the

174 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

boat would start, and what time they would get to
Montreal next evening, with other matters that
strangers going upon the same journey may prop-
erly marvel over in company. The introduction
having thus accomplished itself, they exchanged ad-
dresses, 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 state-rooms ; but
the new acquaintances sat vis-d-vls at the table,
and after supper the ladies drew their chairs to-
gether 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, lumi-
nous 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 tran-
quil expanse of the lake, on which loomed, far or
near, a full-sailed schooner, and presently melted
into the twilight, and left the steamer solitary upon
the waters. The company was small, and not re-
markable 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

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 175

of the captain, seated on the upper deck, and smok-
ing a cigar that flashed and fainted like a station-
ary fire-fly in the gathering dusk. How very^
distant, in this mood, were the most recent events !
Niagara seemed a fable of antiquity ; the ride froin
Rochester a myth of the Middle Ages. In tliis
200I, 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 mingling with a peculiar
self-reliance.

" 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
r>f belief in your good-nature and sympathy makes
you feel worthy of it, don't you know ; and so you
can't help being good-natured and sympathetic.
This Miss Ellison, why, I can tell you, I shouldn't
be ashamed of her anywhere.' By anywhere Isa-
bel meant Boston, and she went on to praise the
young lady's intelligence and refinement, with

176 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEV.

those expressions of surprise at the existence ol
civilization in a westerner which westerners find it
so hard to receive graciously. Happily, Miss Elli-
sor. had not to hear them. " The reason she hap-
pened 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 tc
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 could be sent for."

" Well, I don't see but Miss Ellison could de-
scribe you to her friends very much as you're
described her to me," said Basil. " How did these
mutual confidences begin ? Whose trustfulness first
flat tered the other's ? What else did you tell about
yourself ? "

" I said we were on our wedding journey,'
guiltily admitted Isabel.

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 177

" O, you did ! "

" Why, dearest ! I wanted to know, for once,
yon see, whether we seemed honeymoon-struck."

" And do we ? '

41 No," came the answer, somewhat ruefully.
" Perhaps, Basil," she added, " we've been a little
toe successful in- disguising our bridal character.
Do you know," she continued, looking him anx
iously ill the face, " this Miss Ellison took me at
first for — your sister ! "

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 good thorough failure for making
people happy."

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 words, " Your sister!'* and
released him with a disdainful repulse.

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
12

178 THEIR WLDDING JOURNEY.

healthful bloom of the Old World still upon thoii
faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty
so that one must wonder if the line between the Da-
minion and the United States did not also sharply
separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These pro-
vincials 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 orange-
women and the old women picking up chips on the
pier ; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the
ocean rather than beyond the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort
Frontenac two hundred years ago ; of Count Fron-
ienac'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.

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

1T9

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
light-house upon one of them, there is almost noth-
ing 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 niorning light they

gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel
which some of them almost touched with the plum-
age 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 water-birds assembling and separating in hei
course. It is curiously affecting to find them so un-
claimed yet from the solitude of the vanished wil-
derness, and scarcely touched even by tradition.
But for the interest left them by the French, these

180

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and
must be enjoyed for their beauty alone. There is
indeed about them a faint light of legend concern-
ing the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several
patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their
lovely multitude ; but this episode of modern his-
tory 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 supplying him with food by night.

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 guide-book, 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
uot so ethereal in her loveliness as an American
^irL, but she was not so nervous and had none oi

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

181

the painful fragility of the latter. Her expression
was just a little vacant, it must be owned ; but so
Ear as she went she was faultless. She looked like

i lie most tractable of daughters, and as if she would
be the most obedient of wives. She had a blame-
less taste in dress, Isabel declared ; her costume of
Dlue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat

182 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

(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 pret-
tily.' ' 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 poorest-
looking 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 pres-
ence. They perceived that beauty was not only
its own excuse for being, but that it flattered and
favored and profited the world by consenting to be.
At Prescott, the boat on which they had come
from Charlotte, and on which they had been prom-
ised a passage without change to Montreal, stopped,
and they were transferred to a smaller steamer
with the uncomfortable name of BansLee. She
was very old, and very infirm and dirty, and in
overy way bore out the character of a squalid Irish
goblin. Besides, she was already heavily lader
with passengers, and, with the addition of the

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 183

Dther steamer's people had now double her comple-
ment ; and our friends doubted if they were not to
pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort.
Their fellow-passengers were in great variety, how-
ever, and thus partly atoned for their numbers.
Among them of course there was a full force of
biides from Niagara and elsewhere, and some curi-
ous forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared.
It is well enough, if she likes, and it may even be
very noble for a passably good-looking young lady
to marry a gentleman of venerable age ; but to
intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively ca-
ressing 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 white-haired husband the unwilling
sympathies of the spectator to see her the centre of
a group of young people, and him only acknowl-
edged from time to time by a Parthian snub.
Nothing, however, could have been more satisfac-
tory 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 good-looking
colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly
brogued voices, and laughed with careless Celtio

184

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

laughter. One of the young fellows presently loat
his hat overboard, and had to wear the handker-
chief 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 bride-
groom had come in for the support of the whoh
good looking, healthy, light-hearted 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 sister-
and-loverhood could not keep their pitying eyes oh*
his downcast face. " What if he, too, were young
at heart ! " the kind little wife's regard seemed to
say.

For the sake of the slight air that was stirring,
and to have the best view of the Rapids, the Ban-
shee's whole company was gathered upon the for-
ward promenade, and the throng was almost as
dense as in a six-o'clock horse-car 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 soria)
feeling, and she was secretly glad when after a
while they shifted their position.

It was deadly hot, and most of the people sad-
dened and silenced in the heat. From time to time
the clouds idling about overhead met and sprinkled

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 18&

down a cruel little shower of rain that vee/ned 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 far-off 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 Ver-
mont, seen vague against the horizon from the St.
Lawrence, or with the quaint little French villages
that begin to show themselves as you penetrate far-
ther down into Lower Canada. These look so
peaceful, with their dormer-windowed cottages clus-
tering about their church-spires, that it seems im-

186 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

possible they could once have been the homes of the
savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand
and scalping-knife 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 priest-led 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 church-tower 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 fain 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 mustard-colored linen duster,
and Basil asked, " Shouldn't you like to know the
origin, personal history, and secret feelings of a

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 187

gentleman who goes about in a duster of that par-
ticular 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
bave yet seen among this boat-load of nonde-
scripts ! "

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,
<*nd surmounted by a heavy double-headed eagle in
gold. This ornament dazzled from a conspicuous
place on the left lappel of his coat ; on Iris hand
shone a magnificent diamond ring, and he bore a
stately opera-glass, with which, from time to time,
he imperiously, as one may say, surveyed the land-
scape. As the imposing apparition grew upon Isa-
bel, " 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 newspa-
per 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

188 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

of some legation at Washington, who had run up
there for his summer vacation. The cross puzzled
him, but the double-headed eagle, he said, meant
either Austria or Russia ; probably Austria, for the
wearer looked a trifle too civilized for a Russian.

" 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 uncon-
scious, unmistakable superiority. " O, that stare ! "
she added ; nothing but high birth and long descent
can give it ! Dearest, he 's becoming a great afflic-
tion to me. I want to know who he is. Couldn't
you invent some pretext for speaking to him ? ''

" 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 fortune to reveal him."

" Well, I suppose I must, but it 's dreadful ; it 'a
really dreadful. You can easily see that 's distinc-
tion," 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 opera-glass from one point
and another. He spoke to no one, and she reason-
ably supposed that he did not know English.

In the mean time it was drawing near the houi
of dinner, but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one.

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 189

two came and went, and then at last came the din-
ner, 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 dis-
dainful American manner, they were of feeble
mind, and not only did everything very slowly (in
the usual Canadian fashion), but with an ineffi-
ciency 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 after-
wards, 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 for-
eigner.

" Naturally, I was somewhat abashed," he said
in the account he was presently called to give Isa-
bel 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 chance,
— when he turned and spoke himself."

" O what did he say; dearest ? "

u He said, ' Pretty tejious waiting ain't it ? in
the best New York State accent."

190 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

" You don't mean it ! " gasped Isabel.

" 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.
1 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
fifty-fourth degree in the secret society he belongs
to ! "

" I don't believe it ! "

u Well, ask him yourself, then," returned Basil ;
" he 's a very good fellow. i O, that stare ! noth-
ing but high birth and long descent could give
it ! ' " he repeated, abominably implying that he
had himself had no share in their common error.

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 for-
ward 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
guess by their looks, and the women and children
like it better than the men. It is no doubt very

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 191

thrilling and picturesque and wildly beautiful : the
children crow and laugh, the women shout forth
their delight, as the boat enters the seething cur-
rent ; 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 pilot-
house smoking with a grave face, the pilots tug
hard at the wheel ; the hoarse roar of the waters
fids 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 pleas-
ure." 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 Cas-
cades. On the rocks of the last lies the skel >ton
of a steamer wrecked upon them, and gnawed at
still by the white-tusked wolfish rapids. No one,
they say, was lost from her. " But how," Basil

192 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 La Chine 's to come yet," they exulted,
" and that 's the awfullest of all ! "

They passed the Lake St. Louis ; the La Chine
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 rap-
ids to keep the boat perfectly trim. Please to re-
main 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 re-
fused ; and then the steamer plunged into the leap-
ing 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 towers of the French ca-
thedral.

Basil had hoped to approach this famous city
with just associations. He had meant to conjure

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 19?

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 histoiian'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
duenna-like, elderly female companion, to be de-
tected in the remote background of every young
actress. She had flirted audaciously during the
day with some young Englishmen and Canadians
oi 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 low because of its
great length that it seemed to bar the steamer's
passage.

" 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 re-
ceived with a gay, impertinent nonchalance, — "I
wonder if we can be going right under that
bridge ? "

" No, sir ! " answered the pretty young actress
with shocking promptness, " we're going right over

it: -

11

194 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

" ' Three groans and a guggle,

And an awful struggle,

And over we go ' ' "

At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian
looked very sheepish — for a beaver ; and all the
other people laughed ; but the noble historical
shades of Basil's thought vanished in wounded
dignity beyond recall, and left him feeling rathei
ashamed, — for he had laughed too.

vin.

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTBEAL.

The feel-
ing of foreign
tra v el for
which our tou-
rists had striv-
en throughout
their journey,
and which
they had
kno wn in
some degree
at Kingston
and all the
way down the
river, was in-
tensified from
the first mo-
ment in Mon-
treal ; and it
was so welcome that they were almost glad to lose
money on their greenbacks, which the conductor cf
the omnibus would take oruy at a discount of
twenty cents. At breakfast next morning thej

196

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 car-
riage-drivers were often Irish, and up and down
the streets with their pious old-fashioned names,
tinkled American horse-cars. Everywhere were
churches and convents that recalled the ecclesias-
tical and feudal origin of the city ; the great tubu-
lar bridge, the superb water-front with its long
array of docks only surpassed by those of Liver-
pool, the solid blocks of business houses, and the
substantial mansions on the quieter streets, pro-
claimed the succession of Protestant thrift and
energy.

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 black-robed
priests upon the street ; Basil could easily have
gone down upon his knees to the white-hooded,
pale-faced 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

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 197

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 aa
in Em-ope to the churches, the churches of a pitiless
superstition, the churches with their atrocious pic-
tures and statues, their lingering smell of the morn-
ing's incense, their confessionals, their fee-taking
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 understand it, and I forgive it
from my soul.

They went first, of course, to the French cathe-
dral, pausing on theii way to alight and walk through
the Bonsecours Market, where the habitans have all
come in their carts, with their various stores of poul-
try, fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a
Btudy. Here is a simple-faced young peasant-
couple with butter and eggs and chickens ravish-
ingly displayed ; here is a smooth-cheeked, black-
eyed, black-haired young girl, looking as if an in-
fusion 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 ot
'sherries and pears ; yonder a whole family train ek-
ing in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar in

198 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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
second-hand merchandise of other sorts ; but above
all prevails the abundance of orchard and garden,
wlrile within the fine edifice are the stalls of the
butchers, and in the basement below a world oi
household utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware, and
wooden-ware. 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 transaction
of business at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued
tone. The fat huckster-women drowsing beside
their wares, scarce send their voices beyond the
borders of their broad-brimmed straw hats, as they
softly haggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip
together.

At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst
paintings in the world, and the massive pine-board
pillars are unscrupulously smoked to look like mar-
ble ; but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been
St. Peter's ; in fact it has something of the barn-
like immensity and impressiveness of St. Peter's.
They did not ask it to be beautiful or grand ; they
des'red it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the
fondly cherished hideousness and incongruity of
vhe average Catholic churches of their remem-
brance, and it did thio and more : it added an effect

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 19$

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 he
roism to teach his race. " O, it is only a savage
man," said the little French boy who was sh wing
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 lec-
turing 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 as-
cent 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 trem-
bling muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller
might well look with delight, and as it is must be-
hold with wonder. So far as the eye reaches it
dwells only upon what is magnificent. All the fea-
tures 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-
foli/iged 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

200 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and dark, to its confluence with the St. Lawrence,
Then these two mighty streams commingled flow
past the city, lighting up the vast champaign coun
try to the south, while upon the utmost southern
verge, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits
of far-off mountains.

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 ex-
celled by any of the abounding and boastful cities
of the Republic. Long before they quitted Mon-
treal they had rallied from this weakness, but they
delighted still to honor her superb beauty.

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 peasant-
like ODmmonness, 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. 7Tie social
heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-coun-
try, that is plain, whatever the political tendency

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 201

may be ; and the public monuments and inscrip-
tions celebrate this affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is diepened
by the epitaphs of those whose lives were passed in
the joint service of England and her loyal cliild ;
and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy
with the sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty
in 'hat 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
as only in history. It gave a glamour of olden
time to the new land ; it touched the pro»aic demo
cratic 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 architectu-
ral taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black -eved
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

202 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cathe-
dral indeed, painted and gilded a merveille, and
everywhere stuck about with big and little saints
and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad — but
for those in the French cathedral. There is, of
course, a series lepresenting Christ's progress tc
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 tediously explained them.

u Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and
then pay him for it ? " Isabel asked.

u 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 glorious likeness of an Italian
beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind,
those absurdly sentimental people, whom yet I can-
not find it in my heart to blame for their folly,
though I could name ever so many reasons for re
buking it. Why, in fact, should we wish to find
America like Europe ? Are the ruins and impos-
tures 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 ef-

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 203

fective shapes of ignorance and want and incredi-
bility, that we must forever seek an alien contiast
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 public-school 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 pleas-
ure in their sad, pallid existence ?

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,
^'ires and improvements had made havoc among
the quaint houses 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 one-story
dwellings opened from the pavement, and within
you saw fat madame the mother moving about her
domestic affairs, and spare monsieur the elderly
I; isband smoking beside the open window ; French
babies crawled about the tidy floors ; French mar-
tyrs (let us believe Lalement or Br^beuf, who gave
up their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada)
lifted their eyes in high-colored lithographs on the
wall ; 'among the flower-pots in the dormer-window

204 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 Winslow."
Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made a
refuge within the ample borders of their convent
f^r infirm old people and for foundling children,
and it is now in the regular course of sight-seeing
for the traveller to visit their hospital at noonday,
when he beholds the Sisters at their devotions in
the chapel. It is a bare, white-walled, cold-look-
ing 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 Ameri-
cans, 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 prayer-
book 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 re-
sounding shoes. The two young girls at the head
were very pretty, and all the pale faces had a
corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their pen-
sive sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest
girls might very well be the twain that he had sees

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 205

there 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 move-
ments. 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 self-
doomed to renew the likeness of that youthful
death ?

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 self-sacrifice 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 con-
vent, 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
Buch as you, than in her grandest fanes or the sight
of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests,
iwinging censers, tapers and pictures and image*,

206 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY,

under a gloomy heaven of cathedral arches. There,
indeed, the faithful have given theii substance;
but here the nun has given up the most precious
part of her woman's nature, and all the tenderness
that clings about the thought of wife and mother.

" 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 happi-
ness, for health and life. So I grieve for the earli-
est 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 free-
dom 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 im-
nure 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 o?

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 207

lofty rapture ? You can fancy her some Indian
maiden lured to the renunciation by the splendor
of symbols and promises seen vaguely through tho
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 wil
derness into which she had fled. Well, the Church
knows and God. She was dust long ago."

From time to time there had fallen little fitful
showers during the morning. Now as the wedding-
journeyers passed out of the convent gate the rain
dropped soft and thin, and the gray clouds that
floated through the sky so swiftly were as far-seen
Gray Sisters in flight for heaven.

" 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.

" Nine miles."

44 O, then we can't think of going with one horse.
You know," she added, 44 that we always intended
to have two horses for going round the mountain."

'No," said Basil, not yet used to having hia
decisions reached without his knowledge. 4t And I
don't see why we should. Everybody goes with
one. You don't suppose we're too heavy, do you ? "

44 1 had a party frcm the States, ma'am, yester-

208 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

clay," interposed the driver ; " two ladies, real heavy
ones, two gentlemen, weighin' two hundred apiece,
and a stout young man on the box with me.
You'd 'a' thought the horse was drawin' an empty
carriage, the way she darted along."

" Then his hor§« must be perfectly worn out
to-day," said Isabel, refusing to admit the poor
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 his error.

" Why, it seems a pity," whispered Basil, dis-
passionately, " to turn this man adrift, when ho had
a reasonable hope of being with us all day, and has
been so civil and obliging."

44 O yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do ! Why
don't you sentimentalize his helpless, overworked
horse ? — all in a reek of perspiration."

" Perspiration ! Why, my dear, it 's the rain ! "

" Well, rain or shine, darling, I don't want to go
round the mountain with one horse ; and it 's very
unkind of you to insist now, when you've tacitly
promised me all along to take two.'

" Now, this is a little too much, Isabel. You
know we never mentioned the matter till this
4ioment."

" It 's the same as a promise, your not saying you
wouldn't. But I don't ask you to keep your word.
Z don't want to go round the mountain. I'd much
rather go to the hotel. I'm tired."

" Very well, then, Isabel, I'll leave you at fch«
h3tel."

THE SENTx.lENT OF MONTREAL. '209

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
u

2H' THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 be-
fore ; and now that blessed time seemed ages since,
and they were further asunder than those who have
never been friends. " I thought," bitterly n used
Isabel, " that he would have done anything foi
ine." " 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 one-
horse carriage, trying to drive away from the wreck
of his happiness. All was over ; the dream was
past ; the charm was broken. The swTeetness 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 enjoy-
ment, how poor and stupid and empty looked their
wedding-journey ! Basil spent five minutes in ar-
raigning his wife and convicting her of every folly
uiid fault. His soul was in a whirl, —

" For to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.'

In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraiding?
ho found himself suddenly become her ardent ad-

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 211

vocate, and ready to denounce her judge as a heart-
less 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 one-horse carriage driver dismissed
with a handsome pour-boire, and a pair of lusty
bays with a glittering barouche waiting at the door
below. He swiftly accounted for his presence, which
Bhe 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 gracious art is the only one unknown to
the sex.

She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life,
amidst which she had heart-brokenly sat down with
all her things on. " I knew you'd come back," she
said.

" So did I," he answered. " I am much too good
and noble to sacrifice my preference to my duty."

14 1 didn't care particularly for the two horses,
Basil," she said, as they descended to the barouche.
" It was your refusing them that hurt me."

" And I didn't want the one-horse 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
^ayly out of the city.

" Never ! I can't conceive of it. I suppose if
this were written down, nobody would believe it."

212 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

"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 waa
broken off, long ago ? Did you hate me ? "

" I did, most cordially ; but not half so much as
f 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 quar-
rel 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
Bquabble."

" 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 /couldn't make
the advances. I don't think it is quite feminine to
be the first to forgive, is it ? "

" I'm sure I can't say. Perhaps it would be
rather unladylike."

" Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get
at is this : whethei we shall love each other the
more or the less for it. / think we shall get on
all the better for a while, on account of it. But I
ahould have said it was totally out of character,
It 's something you might have expected of a very
foung bridal couple ; but • after what we've beer
through, it seems too improbable."

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 218

44 Very well," said Basil, who, having made all
the concessions, could not enjoy the quarrel as she
did, simply because it was theirs ; " let 's beha\e as
if it had never been."

44 O no, we can't. To me, it 's as if we had just
won each other."

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. Peasant- villages,
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
sheeps' 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
3arts first built there two hundred years ago. They
were grateful for the immortal old won en, crooked

214 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 peasant-maid, they could only .sigh
out their unspeakable satisfaction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cot
tages, through the open doors of which they coul<!
Bee the exquisite neatness of the life within. One
of the doors opened into a school-house, where they
beheld with rapture the school-mistress, book in
hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head, and
encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.

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,
wliile 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 as they crept from picture tc
picture.

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

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.

216

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 dark-robed tra-
dition, the tonsured vision of an age and a church
that are passing.

" Do you un-
derstand French,
monsieur ? "

" A very little,
monsieur."

" 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 be-
tween his cross-
ings at the differ-
ent altars. At the
high altar there
was a very fair
Crucifixion ; be-
tore this the priest bent one knee. " Fine picture,
fine altar, fine church," he said in English. At
mst they stopped near the poor-box. As their

216 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

coins clinked against those within, he smiled se-
renely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed,
and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he van-
ished through the narrow door by which he had
entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on
the church steps. Then she cried, —

11 O, why didn't something happen ? "

" Ah, my dear ! what could have been half so
good as the nothing that did happen ? Suppose
we knew him to have taken orders because of a dis-
appointment 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 priest,
we should not think him half so interesting as we
do now."

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 out-English the
English even in the matter of pale-ale 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 mother-country ?

Our friends began to detect something servile in
it all, and but that they were such amiable persons,

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 217

the loyally perfect digestion of Montreal would have
gone far to impair their own.

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' win-
dows were full of Canadian editions of our authors,
and English copies of English works, instead of our
pirated editions ; the dry-goods stores were gay
with fabrics in the London taste and garments of
the London shape ; here was the sign of a photog-
rapher to the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H.
the Prince of Wales ; a barber was " under the
patronage of H. R. II. the Prince of Wales, H. E.
the Duke of Cambridge, and the gentry of Mon-
treal." 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 dif-
ference 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 kind-
liness ; the Irishmen who drove the public carriages
were as civil as our own Boston hackmen, and be-
haved as respectfully under the shadow of England
here, as they would have done under it in Ireland.
The problem which veies us seems to have been

218 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 can-
not be lowest, will at least be highest ?

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 overween-
ing loyalty placed a great country like Canada in a
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 suc-
cess by the criterions of a necessarily different civil-
ization, the social and intellectual dependence im-
plied 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 subor-
dinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no
basis in the New World, and that till it is shaken
loose from England it cannot have.

It would be a pity, howevei , if it should be
parted from the parent country merely to be joined
to an unsympathetic half-brother like ourselves
»nd nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 219

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 for-
getfulness 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
hulking young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the
Lakes, " Sever the apron-strings of allegiance, and
try to be yourself whatever you are."

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
*t was to * he colonial dependence of Canada she
owed the wbility to buy things so cheaply there.

The fact is that the ladies, parlor at the hotel
had been after dinner no better than a den of smug-
glers, 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 free-trader 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

220 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

that silk umbrellas were most eligible wares ; and
in the display of such purchases the parlor was
given the appearance of a violent thunder-storm.
Gloves it was not advisable to get ; they were bet-
ter 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 good-
humor or not. You must not try to take in any-
thing 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 conver-
sation had upon her. Her eyes sparkled ; hex

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 221

cheeks glowed ; all the woman was on fire for
smuggling. He sighed heavily and wen^ out with
her to do the little shopping.

Shall I follow them upon their excursion 9
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 surpris-
ingly generous constructionists of our revenue laws.
Isabel had profited by every word that she had
heard in the ladies' parlor, and she would not ven-
ture 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 piece-
velvets and the linens smote her to the he&rt.
But they also stimulated her invention, and she
bought and bought of the made-up wares in real
or fancied needs, till Basil represented that neither
their purses nor their trunks could stand any more.
44 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
.test, after she had declared repeatedly, " There,
now, I am done," she briskly led the way back to
the hotel to pack up her purchases.

Basil parted with her at the door. He was a

222 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNEY.

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, who had built the admirable city before
them.

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
tumble-down warehouses that dishonor the water-
side in most cities, ^ise 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?"

" One side of it," answered Basil, dreamily,
M but all the rest is black."

44 What do you mean, my dear ? "

" Why, the Nelson Monument, with the suniel
on it, at the head of the street there."

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 223

The effect was so fine that Isabel could net be
angry with him for failing to heed what the had
said, and she mused a moment with him.

" It seems rather far-fetched," she said presently,
" to erect a monument to Nelson in Montreal,
doesn't it ? But then, it 's a very absurd monu-
ment when you're near it," she added, thought-

fully.

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
past 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 Old- World fight,
11 with mustached lip and bearded chin, with arque-
buse and glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass,"
moved among the plumed and painted savages ;
then he lifted Jacques Cartier 3 eyes, and looked

224 -THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

out upon the magnificent landscape. " East, Treat,
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 battle-ground of later
centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor, wrapped in
illimitable woods."

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
trading-post 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 fur-traders' 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 mead-
ows, that spread all gay with early flowers where
Hochelaga once stood, and with the black-robed
Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and
devoted nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train,
kneeling about the altar raised there in the wilder-
ness, and silent amidst the silence of nature at the
lifted Host.

He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel,
using the colors of the historian who has made
:hese scenes the beautiful inheritance of all dream
ore, and sketched the battles, the miracles, the suf-
ferings, and the penances through which the pioua

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 225

colony was preserved and prospered, till they both
grew impatient of modern Montreal, and would
fain have had the ancient Villemarie back in its
place.

" 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 Beaf n 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 snob-
bish colonial dependence and sentimentality, seek-
ing 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 trodden by Cham-
plain, and won for its present masters by the death
of Wolfe ! "

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. Dur-
ing supper they were served by French waiters,
who, without apparent English of their own, mirac-
ulously understood that of the passengers, except
u

226 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 bo
officered by Frenchmen throughout ; certainly, aa
our tourists in the joy of their good appetites
affirmed, the cook was of that culinarily delightful
nation.

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 self-respect 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 sa-
loon. They were plain-looking men and women,
mostly, and provincial, it was evident, to their in-
most hearts ; provincial in origin, provincial by in-
heritance, by all their circumstances, social and
political. Their relation with France was not a
proud one, but it was not like submersion by the
dip-slop of English colonial loyalty ; yet they seem
.o 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 tc
have been cut off from the parent-country, and

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 227

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 well ; and probably they have none.

Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the per-
son of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had
shown her and Basil the pictures in the country
church. She was confessing to the priost, and she
was not at all surprised to find that he was Basil
in a suit of mediaeval 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, aloud, " we must have two horses ! "

" Ten, if you like, my dear," answered his voice,
cheerfully, " though I think we'd better ride up in
the omnibus."

She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.
" We're in sight of Quebec," he said. " Come
out as soon as you can, — come out into the seven-
teenth century."

IX.

QUEBEC.

Isabel hurried
out upon the for-
ward promenade,
where all the
other passengers
seemed to be as-
sembled, and be-
held a vast bulk
of gray and pur-
ple rock, swell-
ing two hundred
feet up from the
mists of the
river, and taking
the early morn-
ing light warm
upon its face and
crown. Black-hulked, red-chimneyed Liverpooj
■teamers, gay river-craft and ships of every sail anc
flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries
sped their swift traffic-laden shuttles ; a lower town
clung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populous
and picturesque, up its sides ; from the massive cit-

QUEBEC.

229

ftdel 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 antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, mod-
ern 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 mediseval
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 be-
side which the Bonsecours Market would have
shown as common as the Quincy, and up the odd
wooden - side- -^

walked street
stretched an
aisle of car-

riages and -s^o^JJBh&N^^ jjT ~-^^^^^^^- \
those high
swung calash-
es, which are J^HJ
to Quebe c
what the gon-
lolas are to

230 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon oui
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 sum
mer 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 weed-grown
rock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate,
pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passen-
gers. 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 pass-
ing wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding
commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome
his native politeness, appear and demand their pass-
ports ? 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 what perverse pretext, then, was it not
Borne ancient town of Normandy ?

M Put a few enterprising Americans in here, ana
they'd soon rattle this old wall down and let in a
little fresh air ! " said a patriotic voice at Isabel'i
elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow

QUEBEC. 231

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
Btands, 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 wood- work,
the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the de-
sired character of age, and its slovenly state be-
stowed 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 tele-
graph 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 attend-
ance of those swarms of flies which infest Quebec,

232 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 otherwise a breakfast
worthy of the appetites that honored it.

Theiii 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 English-Canadian, 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 impartially fond of both : it was quite a family
affair.

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
la so tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy

QUEBEC. 233

or so apt to end in mutual dislike, — except grati-
tude. 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. 0:ir friends
necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. II
was raining one of those cold rains by which the
scarce-banished 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 seri-
ous 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 lat-
ter work chiefly for the glorious prospects of the
St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it com-
manded. Advanced into the centre of an amphi-
theatre inconceivably vast, that enormcus beak of
rock overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and

2b4 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

then, in every direction, immeasurable stretches of
gardened vale, and wooded upland, till aU melts
into the purple of the encircling mountains. FaT
and n«*ar 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 river-shores. Tin
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 east-
ern 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 mis-
sionary city of Quebec ; round this rocky beak came
sailing the half-piratical 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 Massa-
chusetts, 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

QUEBEC. 235

here Montgomery laid down his life at the head of
the boldest and most hopeless effort of our War of
Independence.

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 tin
officers' quarters and those of the common soldiers,
not far from which was a line of hang-dog fellows
drawn up to receive sentence for divers small mis-
demeanors, 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 'njustice, 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 thought — to so
little in him came the victories he had helped to
win in the Crimea, in China, and in India — that
he could take care of a gentleman's horse and work

236

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

about his place. He looked inquiringly at Basil, as
if lie 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
mown to him stowed away in one of those cavernous
rooms in the earthworks where the married soldien

have their quarters. His regret enriched Jne ro-
jvard of Private Drakes' service, — which perhaps
mswered one of Private "Drakes' purpose*,, if not
his chief aim. He promised to come to the States
upon the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking
from her own largb experience, declared that every-
body got on there * and he bade our friends ar

QUEBEC. 237

affectionate farewell as they drove away to the
Plains of Abraham.

The fashionable e irburban cottages and places of
Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading north-
ward to the old battle-ground and beyond it ; but
these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawence
and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and shrubbery
hide them in an English seclusion from the high-
way ; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly med-
itate 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 beau-
tiful 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 English-speaking 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 peiish for an alle-
giance to which the mother-country was indifferent.

238

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and fighting against the armies with which England
was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian
population, is a magnificent spectacle ; and Mont-
calm 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 Church-
yard," which he would " rather have written than
beat the French to-morrow ; " 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 con-
querors who raised to Wolfe's memory the column
on the battle-field.

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 hia
monument; yet it is sufficient, and the simple in
•cription, " Here died Wolfe victorious," gives it a

QUEBEC. 239

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 tour-
ists comfortably sentimentalized the scene behind
the close-drawn 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
battle-field ; 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
soft 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

240 THEIR WEDDING TOURNEY.

«lain, 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
a\ray for shelter into little hollows, and behind
bushes and fallen trees ! Did be, whose soul w as 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 battle-fields, 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 pasture-land 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 self-con-
quest, his victory over fear and pain and love of lile.
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 of thousands ? So old a world
%nd groping still !

The tourists were better fitted for the next occa-
t*on of sentiment, which was at the Hotel Dieu.

QUEBEC. 241

irlrither they went after returning from the battle-
field. It took all the mal-address of which trav-
ellers are masters to secure admittance, and it
was not till they had rung various wrong bells,
and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking
French through grated doors, and set divers sym-
pathetic spectators doing ineffectual services, thai
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 Bre*beuf , one of those Jesuit mar-
tyrs 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, land face led them
through a ward of the hospital into the chapel,
which they found in the expected taste, and ex-
quisitely neat and cool, but lacking the martyr's
skull. They asked if it were not to be seen.
" Ah, yes, poor PSre Bre*beuf ! " sighed the gentle
sister, with the tone and manner of having lost him
yesterday ; " we had it down only last week, show-
ing it to some Jesuit fathers ; but it 's in the con-
vent now, and isn't to be seen." And there min-
gled apparently in her regret for PSre BreHbeuf 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 wafl
nothing to see in it. She deprecated their compli-

18

212 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

oients with many shrugs, but she was pleased ; foi
when we renounce the pomps and vanities of thia
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 self-denying
toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in
her manner, a spiritual-worldliness 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 to-
gether. They came presently to the last hall, at
the end of which sat another nun, beside a win-
dow that gave a view of the busy port, and beyond
it the landscape of village-lit plain and forest-dark-
ened height. On a table at her elbow stood a
rose-tree, on which hung two only pale tea-roses;
60 fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wondei
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 at
from too costly a gift. " Take it," said the first

QUEBEC.

243

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, ly-
ing light in her palm, exhaled a delicate odor, and

n

a thrill of exquisite compassion for it trembled
through her heart, as if it had been the white,
loistered 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
oould have found no thorn on it to press his aching

244

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 H6tel Dieu ?

" 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 out-
side." And she gave her rose for this humble use
as lovingly as she devoted herself to her lowly
cares.

"It is very little to see," she said at the end ;
" but if you are pleased, I am very glad. Good-
by, good-by ! " She stood with her arms folded,
and watched them out of sight with her kind, co-
quettish little smile, and then the mute, blank life
of the nun resumed her.

From H6tel 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 dis-
tance 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 denned
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

QUEBEC. 246

eyes full of a merry deviltry ; the other, clean-
ahaven, 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
bo as to cover her forehead with a straggling sandy-
colored fringe. She had an English look, and three
or four others, with dark complexion and black,
unsteady eyes, and various abandon of back-hair,
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 jew-
eled with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was
to the ordinary style of society what scene-painting
is to painting, and might have borne close inspec-
tion no better. They seemed the best-humored
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 o* violated convention, of
lomething Gil Bias-like, almost picaresque.

246 THEIR WEDDLtfG JOURNEY.

If they had needed explanation it would have
been given by the announcement in the office of
the hotel that a troupe of British blondes was ther.
appearing in Quebec for one week only.

After dinner they took possession of the parlor,
and while one strummed fitfully upon the ailing
hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop, oi
course, as all of us do when several of a trade are
got together.

" Wat," said the eldest of the dark-faced, black-
haired British blondes of Jewish race, — " w'at are
we going to give at Montrehal ? "

" We're going to give 4 Pygmalion,' at Montre-
hal," answered the British blonde of American birth,
good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her sis-
ter.

" But we cahn't, you know," said .the lady with
the fringed forehead ; " Hagnes is gone on to New
York, and there 's nobody to do Wa»uua. '

" Yes, you know," demanded the urst speaker
" oo 's to do Wenus ?

" Bella 's to do Wenus," said a third.

There was an outcry at this, and " 'Ow ever
would she get herself up for Wenus ? " and " W'at
a guy she'll look ! " and " Nonsense ! Bella 's toe
'eavy for Wenus ! " came from different lively crit-
ics ; and the debate threatened to become too inti-
mate for the public ear, when one of their gentle-
men came in and said, " Charley don't seem so
well this afternoon." On this the chorus changed

QUEBEC. 247

its note, and at the proposal, " Poor Charley, let 'a
go and cheer 'im hup a bit," the whole good- tern
pered company trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the after-
noon to that sort of aimless wandering to and fro
about the streets which seizes a foreign city un-
awares, and best develops its charm of strange-
ness. So they went out and took their fill of Que-
bec with appetites keen through long fasting from
the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Mon-
treal, and impartially rejoiced, in the crooked
up-and-down hill streets ; the thoroughly French
domestic architecture of a place that thus denied
having been English for a hundred years ; the
porte-cocheres beside every house ; the French
names upon the doors, and the oddity of the beli-
pulls ; the rough-paved, rattling streets ; the shin-
ing roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows ;
the littleness of the private houses, and the great-
ness of the high-walled and garden-girdled con-
vents ; the breadths of weather-stained city wall,
and the shaggy cliff beneath ; the batteries, with
their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of
.masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with
nursery-maids upon the carriages, while the chil-
dren tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and
dhell ; the sloping market-place before the cathe-
dral, where yet some remnant of the morning's
traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where
Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of

248 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

an old woman peasant enough to have soil it in any
market-place oi Europe ; the small, dark shops l>e-
yond the quarter invaded by English retail irade ;
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 staii-
ways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper
fco the Lower Town ; the bustle of the port, with
its commerce and shipping and seafaring life hud-
dled 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 mead-
ows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of
Cartier and Montcalm.

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 re-
veling amid the familiar rococo splendors of the
temple. Every swaggering statue of a saint, e^sery
rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that or
the carven and gilded clouds above the high altai
float —

" Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders," —
was precious to them : the sacristan dusting th*

QUEBEC. 249

sacred properties with a feather brush, and giving
each shrine a business-like nod as he passed, was as
a long-lost brother ; they had hearts of aggressive
tenderness for the young girls and old women whd
Btepped in for a half-hour's devotion, and for the
men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a
moment from affairs and crops, and gave it to tte
saints. There was nothing in the place that nee3
remind them of America, and its taste was exactly
that of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth
century. They could easily have believed them-
selves 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 them of the possibility of cold.

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 French-
men, who expected to find th< .e the climate of their
native land, and ripen her tvines in as kindly a sun,
have perpetuated the image of home in so many
things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emo-
tion to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon
them. As you ponder some characteristic aspect oi
Quebec, — a bit of street with heavy stone houses,
opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a
Lorabardy 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
iky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a

250 THEIR WEDDING JCURNEY.

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 con-
sciousness 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 without or
from within, that light of the North is there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the
little circular garden near Durham Terrace, where
every brightness of fall flowers abounded, — mari-
gold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and
sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflores-
cence, 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 conscious-
ness of this latent cold, of winter only held in abey-
ance 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 af-
ternoon 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 governor-general 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 mer-
:ted praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind cJ

QUEBEC. 251

posthumous friendship between Wolfe and M >nt-
calm, which gives their memory its rare distinction,
and unites them, who fell in fight against each
other, as closely as if they had both died for the
same cause.

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 cap-
ital in the European sense, with all the advantages
of a small vice-regal court, and its social and polit-
ical intrigues, in the French times. Under the
English, for a hundred years it was the centre of
Colonial civilization and refinement, with a gov-
ernor-general's residence and a brilliant, easy, and
delightful society, to which the large garrison of
former days gave gayety and romance. The hon-
ors of a capital, first shared with Montreal and
Toronto, now rest with half-savage 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 nurse-maids. 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 sem-
blance 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.

252 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and children that played screaming from seat to
seat and path to path and over the too-hea\ily
shaded grass. In spite of a conspicuous warning
that any dog entering the garden would be de-
stroyed, the place was thronged with dogs unmo-
lested and apparently in no danger of the threat-
ened doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation
wa3 given in the legend rudely carved upon one of
the benches, " Success to the Irish Republic ! '

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 Eu-
rope constantly in their minds, they were bewil-
dered 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 Sabbath-day
best to the modish young Quebecker, who spread
his handkerchief on the floor to save his pantaloons
during supplication. There was fashion and educa-
tion 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 gold-laced
coat ai.d bearing a silver staff, bowed to them when
they entered, and, leading them to a pew, punched
ap a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed hia

QUEBEC. 25b

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 con-
Boled 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 sacristan and the odor of incense.

They thought the type of French-Canadian 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 eveiy
door and window ; and this dinner was to be abun-
dantly garnished with onions, for the dullest nose
*x»uld not err concerning that savor.

Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed
itself superior to every distinction of race, were
itrolling vaguely, and not always quite happily

254 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

about ; but they made no impression on the propel
local character, and the air throughout the morning
was full of the sentiment of Sunday in a Catholic
city. There was the apparently meaningless jan-
gling 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 de-
votion. Little stands for the sale of knotty apples
and choke-cherries and cakes and cider sprang mag-
ically into existence after service, and people were
already eating and drinking at them. The carriage-
drivers 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 vivac-
ity 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
is it?

QUEBEC.

255

Of the many beautiful things to see in the neigh-
borhood of Quebec, our wedding- journeyers were in
doubt on which to bestow their one precious after-
noon. 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 primi-
tive peasant life, or Montmorenci, with the un-
rivaled fall and the long drive through the beauti-
ful village of Beauport ? Isabel chose the last, be-
cause 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 jour-
nal 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 of the same excursion long
ago.

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 touchea
jf nature and reality, and Basil could not utterly
despise himself for having written it. " Yes," he
Raid, " life was then a thing to be put into pretty
periods ; now it 's something that has risks and aver-
ages, and may be insured."

There was regret, fancied or expressed, in hia

256 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNEY.

tone, that made her sigh, "Ah ! if I'd only had a
little more money, you might have devoted yourseli
to literature ; " for she was a true Bostonian in her
honor of our poor craft.

" 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 going back to my applications
and policies to-morrow."

To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her.
Then their wedding journey would begin to end to-
morrow ! So it would, she owned with another
sigh ; and yet it seemed impossible.

" There, ma'am," said the driver, rising from his
seat and facing round, while he pointed with his
whip towards Quebec, " that 's what we call the Sil-
ver City."

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
within one day of the end of a wedding journey
that never ended ' "

QUEBEC. 2M

From far down the river by which they rode
came the sound of a cannon, breaking the Sabbath
repose of the air. k' That 'a the gun of the Liver-
oool steamer, just coming in," said the driver.

" O," cried Isabel, "I'm thankful we're only tc
*tay one night more, for now we shall be turned
out of our nice room by those people who tele-
giaphed for it ! "

There is a continuous village along the St. Law-
icnce 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 befal-
len 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
firtue, — 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 kind-
aes3 lost. But the looks of the passers-by corrob-
orated him, and as for the little houses, open-doored
beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window

17

258 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

and portal, they were miracles of picturesquenesa
and cleanliness. From each the owner's slim do-
main, narrowing at every successive division among
the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river
in well-defined Hues, and beside the cottage is a
garden of pot-herbs, 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, pass-
ing a way-side 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 long-lost ancestral summers of Nor-
mandy. At every moment, in passing through this
ideally neat and pretty village, our tourists must
.hink of the lovely poem of which all French
Canada seems but a reminiscence and illustration,
ft was Grand Pre*, not Beauport ; and they paid
an eager homage to the beautiful genius which has
touched those simple village aspects with an undy-
ing charm, and which, whatever the land's political
allegiance, is there perpetual Seigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad intervale

■

QUEBEC. 259

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
country-house in which the Duke of Kent spent
some merry days of his jovial youth, and come in
sight of two lofty towers of stone, — monuments
and witnesses of the tragedy of Montmorenci.

Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against
the will of the neighboring habitans, hung from
these towers high over the long plunge of the cata-
ract. 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 cata-
ract 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.

260

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad
tale as he halted his horses on the bridge ; and as
his passengers looked down the rock-fretted brown
torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion
to shudder that ever she had set foot on that sus-
pension-bridge 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 the unsafety
of all bridges of that design.

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 l "
and led toward a weather-beaten summer-house
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 com-
manding point was sufficiently chasmal and precip-
itous. 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 lik«
ft cloud, —

" Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem."

QUEBEC. 261

1 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-smitttn snow ;
but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has
a creamy warmth in its luminous mass ; and 30,
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 com-
prehend 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
timber-merchant's uses in setting the river at work
in his saw-mills 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 of them by a sepa-
rate effort.

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 vis-
ion with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser
ihan 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 land-
scape gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a
pensive sentiment of autumn to the world. The

262

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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
np to stare at them ; their little guides, having

QUEBEC. 263

found that these people had no pleasure in the
sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a prec-
ipice, threw themselves also down upon the grass
and crooned a long, lon£ ballad in a mournful
minor key about some maiden whose name was La
Belle Adeline. It was a moment of unmixed en-
joyment 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 aa
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 so — it 's all
right."

" 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 1
think it 's one of the great charms of a husband*

264

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

that you're not forced to express yourself to him.
A husband," continued Isabel, sententiously, poising
k bit of meringue between her thumb and finger,
— for they had reached that point in the repast, —
" a husband is almost as good as another woman ! n

In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and ex-
c.'iange^ the history of the day with them.

" Certainly," said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, " it 'a
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 to-night ; have you got another
room ? "

" Not precisely," said Isabel ; " we have a coop
in the fifth story, right under the roof."

Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her hus-
band and cried in tones of reproach, " Richard,
Mrs. March has a room ! "

" 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 way."

" Nonsense ! " said Mrs. Ellison. " Have yon
seen him since dinner ? "

" I have made life a burden to him for the last
half-hour," returned the Colonel, with the kindliest
•mile.

" O Richard," cried his wife, in despair of hia
amendment, " you wouldn't make life a burden to

QUEBEC 265

A mouse ! " And having nothing else for it, she
laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.

'* Well, Fanny," the Colonel irrelevantly an-
swered, " put on your hat and tilings, and let 's all
go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. I know
our friends want to go. It 's something worth see-
ing ; and by the time we get back, the clerk will
have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment."

Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of
Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sunday-night
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 posi-
tion 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 prom-
enade. A stately arcade of solid masonry supports
it on the brink of the rock, and an iron parapet in-
closes 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 ^n*

266

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Terrace itself was densely thronged, ai.d there waa
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, il
Beemed, of the first fashion, but rather of middling
condition in life ; the English being represented o:ily
by a few young fellows and now and then a red-
faced old gentleman with an Indian scarf trailing
from his hat. There were some fair American
costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essen-
tially Quebecian. The young girls walking in pairs,
or with their lovers, had the true touch of provin-
cial unstylishness, the young men the ineffectual
excess of the second-rate Latin dandy, their elders
the rich inelegance of a bourgeoisie in their best.
A few better-figured avocats or notaires (their pro-
fession was as unmistakable as if they had carried
their well - polished brass doorplates upon their
breasts) walked and gravely talked with each other.
The non-American character of the scene was not
less vividly marked in the fact that each person
dressed according to his own taste and frankly in-
dulged private preferences in shapes and colors. ( )ne
of the promenaders was in white, even to his canvai
«hoes ; another, with yet bolder individuality, ap-
peared in perfect purple. It had a strange, almc&t
portentous effect when these two startling figures
met as friends and joined each other in the prome*

QUEBEC. 267

Bade 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 vallexs and the heights now vanished; but
the river defined itself by the varicolored lights r.f
the ships and steamers that lay, dark, motionless
bulks, upon its broad breast ; the lights of Point
Levis swarmed upon the other shore ; the Lowet
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 re-
vealed itself ; a long arch brightened over the north-
ern horizon ; the tremulous flames of the aurora,
pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson, shot up-
ward 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 cleik
another turn on the rack, and make him confess to
% hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel left
her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and in-
vited Miss Kitty to look at her coop in the fifth

268 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY".

story. As they approached, light and music and
laughter ,tole out of an open door next hers, and
Isabel, distinguishing the voices of the theatrical
party, divined that this was the sick-chamber, and
that they were again cheering up the afflicted mem-
ber 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 cam-
araderie existing among the people of the troupe.
They trembled as before the merriment of as many
light-hearted, careless, good-natured young men •.
it was no harm, but it was dismaying ; and,
44 Dear ! " cried Isabel, 44 what shall we do ? "

44 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 moder-
ating his fury.

44 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 mean ! "

Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own de>-
nunciatory manner, but just then she was obliged

/

QUEBEC. 269

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 clerk — I don't know what to call him" —
(" Call him a hotel-clerk, my dear ; you can't say
anything worse," interrupted her husband) —
M seems to think the matter perfectly settled."

" You see, Mrs. March," added the Colonel,
44 he 's able to bully us in this way because he has
the architecture on his side. There isn't another
room in the house."

44 Let me think a moment," said Isabel not think-
ing 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, 44 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, — we — I — shall be happy to have
you call at my place of business. — I didn't commit
myself, did I, Fanny ? — I am sometimes hospita-
ble to excess, Mrs. March," he said, to explain hia
aside. 44 And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on,
madam, and the gratitude of the houseless s^anger
will follow you."

270

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 gentle-
men 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 min-
strelsy 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
good-night.

" It 's the second door from this, isn't it, Isabel ? "
asked her husband.

" Yes, the second door. Good-night."

" Good-night."

The two men walked off together ; but in a min-
ute afterwards they had returned and were knock-
ing tremulously at the closed door.

" O, what has happened ? " chorused the ladies
in woeful tune, seeing a certain wildness ir the facet
that confronted them.

QUEBEC. 271

44 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 stream-
ing 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 s;iw seated
before the mirror a bewildering figure, with di-
sheveled 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 alone prevented
them from rending him in pieces.

44 And what do you suppose it was ? " demanded
his wife, with forced calmness, when he had at last
made an end of the story and his abominable hypoc-
risies.

44 Well, /think it was a mermaid.

44 A mermaid ! " said his wife, scornfully. " Flow
do vou know ? "

m

44 It had a comb in its hand, for one thing ; and
besides, my dear, I hope I know a mermaid when
1 see it. '

44 Well," said Mrs. Ellison, ' it was no mermaid,

272 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

it was a mistake ; and I'm going to see about it*

Will you go with me, Richard ? "

" No money could induce me ! If it 's a mistake,
it isn't proper for me to go ; if it 's a mermaid, it 'a
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 lady-like courage, claim-
ing 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 it.

" Of course," added the invader, "if I'd known
'ow it really was, I never would 'ave listened to
such a thing, never. And there isn't another 'ole
in the 'ouse to lay me 'ead," she concluded.

" Then it 's the clerk's fault," said Mrs. Ellison,
glad to retreat unharmed ; and she made her hus-
band 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 remem-
bered it, and reappearing whenever some strong
point of argument or denunciation occurred to her.

The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked
tribe, threw himself upon their mercy and confessed

QUEBEC. 278

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 there
— she vanished again — would give up the room to
the two gentlemen, he would find her a place with
the housekeeper. To this the lady consented with-
out 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 sne was heard explaining to each as she passed.
The momentary displeasure which she had shown
at her banishment was over. She detailed the facta
with perfect good-nature, and though the others ap-
peared 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 parted from her with some
friendly word. Then all was still.

" Richard," said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel's
room the travellers had briefly celebrated these
events, " I should think you'd hate to leave us alone
up here."

" I do ; but you can't think how I hate to go off
fclone. 1 wish you'd come part of the way with us.

274 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

ladies ; I do indeed. Leave your door unlocked, at
any rate.*'

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 bu-
reaus and washstands rolled against the door.
i4 The ladies are fortifying their position,'' said the
Colonel to Basil, and the two returned to their own
chamber. u 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 fig-
ure on the threshold, — a figure with the fringed
forehead and pale blue eyes of her whom they had
«>o lately turned out of that room.

Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, " Ex«
oise me, gentlemen," she said, with a dignity that
recalled their scattered senses, " but will you 'ave

QUEBEC. 275

the goodness to look if my beads are on your table ?
0 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 culpable ;
and vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared.

"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 tiim,
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 bed-
linen, I've been put to sleep between a pair of ta-
ble-cloths ; and I thought I'd like to look. It
seems to me that I make out a ch' ckered pattern
on top and a flowered or arabesque pattern under-
neath. 1 wish they had given m3 mates. It 'a
pretty hard having to sleep between odd table-
cloths. I shall complain to the lanllord of this in
the morning. I've never had to sle* p between odi
table-cloths at any hotel before."

The Colonel's voice seemed scarcel j to have died

276 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 court-yard five stories below. A cer ■
tain breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at
that distance ; the lover avowed his passion in ar-
dent 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 expression
of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to
Basil ; yet he could recollect few things intended
for his pleasure that had given him more satisfac-
tion. He thought, as he glanced out into the moon-
light on the high-gabled 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 foot-lights, there is always something fasci-
nating 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

QUEBEC. 277

friendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twink-
ling-footed burlesque seemed to be playing rather
than living the life of strolling players ; and their
love-making 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 com-
monness 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 fic-
tion. But above all, he was pleased with the natu-
ral 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, u 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 subtile
touch of compassion for those poor strollers, — a
pity so delicate and fine and tender that it hardly
leemed his own but rather a sense of the compac-
tion that pities the whole world.

HOMEWAKD AND HOME.

The travol-

lers all met
at breakfast
and duly dis-
cussed 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 iistribute 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 conscience stayed her hand.

44 Basil," she said, 44 perhaps we'd better declare

HOMEWARD AND HOME. 279

tome ot these things. What 's the duty on those ? "
she asked, pointing to certain articles.

" I don't know. About a hundred per cent, ad
valorem."

" Vest d dire — ?"

" As much as they cost."

" O t hen, dearest," responded Isabel indignantly,
M it carit 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 'a
anything to declare ? "

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 about it, Basil " (heroically) ; "I
couldn't respect you if you did " (tenderly) ;
" but " (with decision) " you must slip out of it
some way ! "

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 dis-
posed to look upon Isabel's compunctions as a kind
of treason to the sex, to be forgiven only because
so quickly repented.

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

280 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

time," said Isabel. "Mr. March has to De 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 ex-
cursion to Lorette, the two parties bade good-by
with affection and many explicit hopes of meeting
soon again.

" What do you think of them, dearest ? " de-
manded Isabel, as she sallied out with Basil for a
final look at Quebec.

" The young lady is the nicest ; and the other is
well enough, too. She is a good deal like you, but
with the sense of humor left out. You've only
enough to save you."

" 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 time in Boston.

They were sauntering towards Durham Terraoe

HOMEWARD AND HOME. 281

frhere they leaned long upon the iron parapet and
blest themselves with the beauty of the prospect.
A tender haze hung upon the landscape and sub-
dued it till the scene was as a dream before them.
As in a dream the river lay, and dream-like 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 the red banner of Saint George in sleep.

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 Quebec.

Next summer they would come again, yes ; but,
ah me ! every one knows what next summer is 1

Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the
omnibus to the Grand Trunk Ferry with them, and
were good-natured to the last, having shaken hands
all round with the waiters, chambermails, and
porters of the hotel. The young fellow with the bad

282 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

amiable face came in a calash, and refused to over-
pay the driver with a gay decision that made him
Basil's envy till he saw his tribulation in getting
the tioupe's luggage checked. There were forty
pieces, and it always remained a mystery, consider-
ing the small amount of clothing necessary to those
people on the stage, what could have tilled 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 of outlawry peril apa
things are not so bad as we like to think them.

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 watcb
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 glass-
ing in its smooth current the elms and willows
of its gentle shores. At one place, where ks calm
broke mto foamy rapids, there was a huge saw-

HOMEWARD AND HOME. 283

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 pictur-
esque. 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 birch-bark 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 pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertis-
ing the new Dollar Store in Portland ? ' They
saw the quaintness vanish from the farm-houses ;
first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the
steep roof, then the steep roo.r itself. By and by
they came to a store with a Grecian portico and
four square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked
no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at
Island Pond took place at nine o'clock, without cost-
ing 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 por-
ters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gen-
tleman 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

284 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

that you are once more in the land of official inso-
lence, 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 wa}7 people were made their
own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused
when he painted the vile terrors of each husband a?
he tremblingly unlocked his wife's store of contra-
band.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy
meadows of western-looking Maine ; and the Grand
Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind
time into Portland. All breakfastless they hur-
ried 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 strug-
gle to construct a meal from the fragmentary op-
portunities 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 bananas.

" Home again, home again, from a foreign shore ! "

they softly sang as the successive courses of this
feast were disposed of.

The drouth and Leat, which they had briefly es-
caped during their sojourn in Canada, brooded

HOMEWARD AND HOME. 285

sovereign upon the tiresome landscape. The red
granite rocks were as if red-hot ; 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 wh .e city was equally
dusty ; and they found the trees in the square be-
fore their own door gray with dust. The bit of
Virginia-creeper planted under the window hung
shriveled upon its trellis.

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 Tran-
script " till the next morning, for fear I should find
your names among the killed and wounded."

" O aunty, you're too good, always ! " whimpered
Isabel ; and neither of the women took note of Basil,
who said, " Yes, it 's probably the only thing that
preserved our lives."

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 begun ; they had entered
upon that long life of holidays which is happy
marriage. By the time dinner was ended they were

286 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

both enthusiastic at having got back, and taking
their aunt between them walked up and down the
parlor with their arms round her massive waist, and
talked out the gladness of their souls.

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 famil-
iar face to welcome him, and in the horse-car into
which he stepped he was charmed to see an acquaint-
ance. 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 effu-
sion, and wrung his hand, smiling from ear to ear.

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, to-morrow, 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 trav-
els are incommunicably our own. We had best say
nothing about our little jaunt to other people, and

HOMEWARD AND HOME. 287

they won't know we've been gone. Even if we
tried, we couldn't make our wedding-journey
theirs."

She gave him a great kiss of recompense and
consolation. " Who wanU it," she demanded, H to
be Their Wedding Journey ? "

XI.

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Life had not
used them ill in this
time, and the fair-
ish treatment they
had received was
not wholly unmer-
ited. The twelve
years past had
made them older,
as the years must
in passing. Basil
was now forty rtwo,
and his moustache
was well sprinkled
with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 289

stouter; be filled his double-breasted frock coat
compactly, and from time to time he had the but-
tons 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 ma-
nipulation 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 busi-
ness 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 every-
thing, they made it an expensive family, and they
spent nearly all Basil earned.

The narrowness of their means, as well as their
household cares, had kept them from taking many
long journeys. They passed their winters in Bos-
ton, 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 jour-

£90 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. •

ney, and perhaps somewhere find their lost second-
youth 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 for Niagara.

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
its sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chro-
moed. 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 Fran-
cisco alone, and then risked his life by stepping off
the moving train, the vastness of the great Ameri-
can 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 be}^ond the
ratio of the dangers that beset her ; and Basil had
counted upon a tonic effect of the change the jour-
ney would make in their daily lives. She looked
ruefully out of the window at the familiar suburbs
whisking out of sight, and the continental immen-
sity that advanced devouringly upon her. But

NIAGARA REVISITED. 291

they had the best section in the very centre of the
sleeping-car, — she drew what consolation she could
from the fact, — and the children's premature de-
mand 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 be-
come 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 vis-
ion from every point of the compass, was shut out
by the curve at the foot of the Belmont hills.

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. In-
deed, 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 percepti-
bly shortened by Tom's quarter-hourly consultations
of his father's watch.

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that their
fellow-passengers were so interesting as their fellow-

292 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

passengers used to be in their former days of travel.
They were soberly dressed, and were all of a mid-
dle-aged sobriety of deportment, from which noth-
ing salient offered itself for conjecture or specula-
tion ; 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 em-
bankments ; 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 ab-
sence with their singing in the village trees about
the stations ; and though Fitchburg and Ayer's
Junction and Athol are not names that invoke his-
torical or romantic associations, the hearts of Basil
and Isabel began to stir with the joy of travel be-
fore 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 293

lives of his passengers for many years by this sim-
ple device. His presence lent the sponge cake and
rhubarb pie and baked beans a supernatural inter-
est, and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the
athletic bird which the mystical ex-partner 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 chil-
dren 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
coffee-pot, 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 boarded :
some 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

294 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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
canal-boat when they grew up, owned that there
were fascinating possibilities in a worn-out railroad
car.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on
either hand, with smooth stretches of the quiet
river, and breadths of grassy intervale and table-
land ; 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 new-mown 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 car-window on a
young lady swinging in a hammock, in her door-
yard, 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 gar-
den-bed, — 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

NIAGARA RF.VISITED. 295

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 shad-
ows 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 appre-
ciable 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 should n't object to
your riding on a little meteor, — you would n't ex-
pect much of that ; but I warn 3011 against comets ;
they are as bad as tunnels."

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 long-

296 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

ing to come to an edge, somewhere, that the New
England traveler experiences on this plain, was in-
articulate with the children ; but it breathed in the
sigh with which Isabel welcomed even the architec-
tural 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.
" Yesr" said her husband ; " it is our own En-
chanted City. I wonder if that unstinted hospital-
ity 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 ad-
vancing 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 ; the}' 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 middle-aged hotel clerks,
but he parts his hair very much on one side, and
brushes it squarely across his forehead to hide his

NIAGARA REVISITED. 297

loss; the forefinger that he touches that little snap-
bell with, when he does n't look at you, must be
very pudgy now. Come, let us get out and break-
fast at Rochester ; they will give us broiled white-
fish ; and we can show the children where Sam
Patch jumped over Genesee Falls, and " —

44 No, no, Basil," cried his wife. 44 It would be
sacrilege ! All that is sacred to those dear young
days of ours ; and I would n't think of trying to
repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that
dining-room 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! Let's leave Rochester
alone, at any rate ! "

44 1 'm not troubled ! We won't disturb our
dream of Rochester ; but I don't despair of Buffalo.
I'm sure that Buffalo will be all that our fancy
ever painted it. I believe in Buffalo."

44 Well, well," murmured Isabel, 44I hope you're
right;" and she put some things together for leav-
ing their car at Buffalo, while they were still two
hours away.

When they reached a place where the land mated

298 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 bleat-
ing trains were arriving in every direction, not only
along the ground floor of the plain, but stately
stretches of trestle-work, 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
trestle-work 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 the lake.
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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 299

plates of griddle cakes with maple syrup ; and lie
hung over the back of first one chair and then another
with an unselfish joy in the appetites of the break-
fasters 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 retro-
actively 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 whose roof
had fallen in some years before, proudly replied
that it was.

" There were a great many killed, were n't there ? "
asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfaction in the
disaster. The porter seemed humiliated ; he con-
fessed the mortifying truth that the loss of life was
small, but he recovered a just self-respect in adding,
" If the roof had fallen in five minutes sooner, it
would have killed about three hundred people."

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 en-
tered the train, and began to run out of the city

300 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

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 con-
nection. 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 burglar.

" 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 object-lesson in
patience and self-denial ; they are experiencing
the fact that they can't have the Rapids till they
get to them, and probably they '11 be disappointed
in them when they arrive."

In fact, the}' 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 dwin-
dled 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 301

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 negotia-
tion, was himself required by the attendant police-
man to step out to the curbstone, and complete his
transaction there. It was an impressive illustra-
tion of the power of a free press, but upon the whole
Basil found the effect melancholy ; it bad the sad-
dening quality which inheres in every sort of per-
fection. 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 fa-
miliar 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, entran-
cing 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-sing-
ing that made itself heard amid the roar of the

302 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Rapids and the solemn incessant plunge of the
cataract, moved their hearts, and made them chil-
dren 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 should be hurt by them below.

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
bazars, and more colored feather fans with whole
birds spitted in the centres ; and there was an offen-
sive 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 pin-cushions. 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,

NIAGARA REVISITED. 303

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 de-
scent; 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 horse-car. 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

304 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

built a large tunnel-like shed quite to the water's
edge, so that you cannot view the cataract as you
one • 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 party-colored 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 near — that you had better have an oil-skin
dress, as Basil did. He told the guide that he did
not wish to go under the Fall, and the guide con-
fidentially 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 leader-
ship, 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. £05

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 that
the hire of a guide and a dress for going under the
Fall was one dollar.

" Will they make you pay a dollar for each of
us, papa ? " asked Tom, fearfully.

" 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 dressing-
room 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 sympathy for the
sake of sparing her needless pain.

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 French-

306 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

man 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 French-
man had paid a dollar for the use of an oil-skin 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 twenty- four 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, chil-
dren! " he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety;
" let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the

NIAGARA REVISITED. 307

Three Sisters, that your mother was afraid to walk
back on after she had crossed it."

" 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 preten-
sion ; and his simulated hilarity only increased
upon paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat
Island bridge.

" What extortion ! " cried Isabel, with an indig-
nation 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 extrava-
gance 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, per-
haps, marked the confirmed husband in Basil more
than these hidden fears and reluctances.

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

308 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

air was full of the perfume that scented it at Pros-
pect 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 seri-
ously maternal towards him than towards the other
children; and he recognized that these fond remi-
niscences were the expression of the girlhood still
lurking deep within her heart.

She shook her head. " No, but I 'm willing the
children should be young in our place. It's only
fair they should have their turn."

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 ac-
tuality 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 309

father with questions, and to collect cumbrous me-
mentos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes,
while he could cut his initials on a band-rail. " 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 some-
times 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 Rapids, on the outer edge
of the last Sister, were no younger, apparently.

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 su-
perb 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 hun-
dred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and points,
and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotech-
nic 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 ;

310 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

but she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would
rather keep her Niagara unchanged ; and she de-
clared 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 burial-
ground on the island : they were exactly the stories
she and Basil had heard twelve years before, and
the ill-starred goats, from which the island took
its name, perished once more in his narrative.

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 mar-
veled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of
the local preparation. Surely the hotels are no-
where 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 stran-
gers here as I used," Basil had suggested to their
driver.

NIAGARA REVISITED. 311

" Oli, they have n't commenced coming yet," he
replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended
that they were plenty enough in July and August.

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 misgiv-
ings 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 sym-
pathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.

Basil got his family away to the station after din-
ner, 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 call-boys 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

312 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

not unusually empty ; and he came out feeling be-
wildered and defrauded. Surely the agent of the
boats which descend the Rapids of the St. Law-
rence must be frank, if Basil went to him and pre-
tended 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 im-
pressive " 6r ^W-morning," had passed away from
the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited
by his widow, who in turn was absent, and tempo-
rarily represented by their son. The boy, in sup-
plying 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 hand. Isabel met him
at the door of the station with a frightened face.

" Basil," she cried, " I have found out what the
trouble is ! Where are the brides ? "

He took her outstretched hands in his, and pass-
ing one of them through his arm walked with her
apart from the children, who were examining at the
news-man's booth the moccasins and the birch-bark
bricabrac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and
vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.

"My dear," he said, "there are no brides; every-
body was married twelve years ago, and the brides
are middle-aged mothers of families now, and don't
come to Niagara if they are wise."

NIAGARA REVISITED. 313

" 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 ab-
sence of the brides. But — but — Down at the
hotels — Did n't you see anything bridal there ?
When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of
minstrelsy ? Was there " —

She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into
the nearest seat.

" Perhaps," said Basil, dreamily regarding the
contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased
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 middle-aged 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 w7hy they receive with surprise
and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness.
Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you w7ere to lay your
head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would
do anything to bring us en rapport with that lost
bridal world again ? ''

314 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Isabel caught away her band. " Basil," she
cried, " it would be disgusting ! I would n't do it
for the world — not even for that world. I saw
one middle-aged 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 did n't dare. We should look like
them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection.
Don't you think we should look like them ? "

44 I don't know," said Basil. " You are certainly
a little wrinkled, my dear."

" And you are very fat, Basil."

They glanced at each other with a flash of resent-
ment, and then they both laughed. " We could n'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 of cherries, Isabel?
The children seem to be enjoying them."

Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of
despair. u Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall
not have a wink of sleep with them to-night.
Where is that nux ? " She hunted for the medi-
cine 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 315

mother, when the children had run off to the news-
stand again.

" 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.
Dont let them get anything else to eat, dearest."

" They are safe ; they have no more money.
They are frugally confining themselves to the ad-
miration 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.

" Not even the Ellisons," said Basil.

" 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 old they '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 won-
der 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 al-
ways seemed as if they ought to meet again, some-
where."

316 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

u I don't believe she ever wished it."

" A man can't tell what a woman wishes."

" Well, neither can a woman," returned Basil,
lightly.

His wife remained serious. " It was a very fine
point, — a very little thing to reject a man for. I
felt that when I first read her letter about it."

Basil yawned. " I don't believe I ever knew
just what the point was."

44 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 before them."

" It was a pretty fine point," said Basil, and he
laughed provokingly.

" He might not have meant to ignore her," an-
swered 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 might have looked at it in that
way."

" Why did n'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 wo-
man 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 thought she had better not
make another trial."

NIAGARA REVISITED. 317

" Well, very possibly you were right. At any
rate, you have the consolation of knowing that it 's
too late to help it now."

" 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 ? Mar-
riage 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 common-
place, every-day 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 ex-
ample, died just before they were married — She
started from this wicked reverie, and ran towards
her husband, whose broad, honest back, with no
visible neck or shirt-collar, was turned towards her,
as he stood, with his head thrown up, studying a
time-table on the wall ; she passed her arm con-
vulsively through his, and pulled him away.

318 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

"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 news-
man'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 recogni-
tion dawn into its eyes, and then it was gone.

" Basil ! " she cried, " stop the train ! That was
Kitty Ellison ! "

" 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 stop-
ping 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

NIAGARA REVISITED. 319

the left band, 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 pre-
caution of hers, the train crossed the bridge in per-
fect safety.

s