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tRARY

UNIVERSITY OF

CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

CLIFFORD CARLETON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

M DCCC xcix

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

CONTENTS

I. THE OUTSET . -. . , •'•.-. . . . I

ii. A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM . . , 42

III. THE NIGHT BOAT . . . > . • 69

IV. A DAY'S RAILROADING ... • • 99
V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND . .119

VI. NIAGARA ... . . • V I49

VII. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE . , . . 2l6

VIII. THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL . • . 243

IX. QUEBEC .. . ... .' • • • 286

X. HOMEWARD AND HOME . . • . 347

XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY . . . .361

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

" We shall not strike the public as bridal, shall we ? " 3

Waiting at the Depot . .... 7

" Don't go by the boat !" . . . . . .10

Running for the Train . . . . . .... 15

A Night Scene . * . . . . . . 23

Early Morning . . ... . 25

Trinity Churchyard . . . „ . --35

In Leonard's Office . . . . . . . 43

Talking their Husbands over . .... 47

A Hot Sidewalk . . .56

Cool, Dark Parlors . . . . . . -59

" I can't stand this much longer" . . . . 63

Your own Stateroom . . . . . .70

A Sheltered Space aft of the Saloon ... 71

Arriving Passengers . . . ... '74

From the Deck ..... . . , . 76

The Poorly Dressed Young Man . . . .84

His Midnight Vigil . . . .... 89

Discussing the Accident . ... . . -93

Watching for the Morning .... . . 97

A Glimpse of the Canal .... . . 103

A Hurried Good-by . . . . . . ' . 107

The Softening Hat . . . , . . . 109

In the Fashion . . . . » . . . no

Buying cheap . . . . . . . . in

Selling dear . . . .... . in

Scraping Acquaintance . . . . . .112

vi List of Illustrations

Imaginary Solitude 113

" Oh, disgusting !" . . . . . . .114

Like Verona . . > . . . . . . 120

The Condescending Hotel Clerk . . . .121

Evidences of Luxury so far from Boston . . 125

A Swarm of Servants . . . . . . .127

The Beacon Street of Rochester .... . 129

" I wish it was we " . . . : . . . . 133

The Genesee Falls . . .. -. . . . 137

The Unsparing Train-boy . . . . . .145

The Arrival . . . . - . . . . 150

At the Foot of the Falls . . . . . . 155

In the Grand Parlor . . . . . . 163

The Breakfast-Room Ordeal . • . . . .171

A Shady Seat on the Island •. ' . \ .. . 177

Public Love-Making . . . . . • . . 184

The Frisky Elderly Gentleman . . . . 191

The Empty Dining-Room . * . . . , . 195

Buying the Little Keepsake . . . . . 203

The Rapids. »" . . . . . -. .209

The Pilot . . . • v . . . , 216

Securing their Stateroom Keys . . . . .217

A Cosy Corner ... . . . . 219

Among the Thousand Islands . . . . . 225

The Nobleman .... . ' . . . . 233

In the Pilot House ... . . . . 237

The Long Sault Rapids .' , • . . . . . 239

Victoria Bridge . ., . . . . , . 242

Bonsecours Market. . ... . 245

The Gray Nuns . . . . . ... .253

The First Serious Dispute ... . . 261

Repenting . . . .... . . . 263

A Slender Young Priest appeared .... 268

Shopping in Montreal ....... 275

List of Illustrations vii

The Nelson Monument . . • . . . 280

An Old Street ... , ... . 287

The Lower Town ... . . . . 289

The Wolfe Monument . . . . . 296

Giving the Rose . . . . . . . 303

The Lively Company . . ... . . 305

A Quaint Street 310

Near Durham Terrace , . . . -. .311

An Old Gateway . . . . .; . . 315

The Village Street . ...... 320

Montmorenci . . . . . . . . 325

On Durham Terrace . . . : . -. ., . . 330

The Mermaid ... . . . . . 337

A Question of Duty . . . . .... 348

The Grecian Portico . . . . . /•« 353

Nearing Home . . . . r1 . . . 355

Home Again . . . . . . . . 357

Beginning the Second Journey . . , , . 365

The Same Clerk . . . . , .' . 371

The Parapet . . . . . . v • . . 377

Cutting his Initials . . . . • . . . 386

Out of Season . . v . .... . 389

" Where are the brides ?" . . . ., . 391

Tail-piece . . . . 8 . ... 399

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY
I

THE OUTSET

fT^HEY first met in Boston, but the match
JL 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 qualified to
rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a sustained or
involved narration ; though I am persuaded that
a skillful romancer could turn the courtship of
Basil and Isabel March to excellent account.
Fortunately for me, however, in attempting to
tell the reader of the wedding journey of a newly
married couple, no longer very young, to be sure,
but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall
have nothing to do but to talk of some ordinary
traits of American life as these appeared to
them, to speak a little of well-known and easily
accessible places, to present now a bit of land-
scape and now a sketch of character.

Their Wedding Joiirney

They had agreed to make their wedding jour-
ney 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
breakfast, all tears and trousseau, and had people
wanting 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 evident bride."

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not
think her at all too old to be taken for a bride ;
and for my part I do not object to a woman's
being of Isabel's age, if she is of a good heart
and temper. Life must have been very unkind
to her if at that age she have not won more than
she has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife

" We shall not strike the fziblic as bridal, shall we ? "

The Outset

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 in-
terval of their broken engagement, which but
for that fatality they might have spent together,
he imagined, in just such rapture as this. The
regret always haunted him, more or less ; it was
part of 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
aunt, who had been contentedly surveying the
tender spectacle before her. " Oh dear ! you '11
never be able to go by the boat to-night, if it
storms. It 's actually raining now ! "

In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible
storm of June, 1870. All in a moment, out of
the hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us be-
fore we quite knew that it threatened, even be-
fore we had fairly noticed the clouds, and it went
on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible

TJieir Wedding Journey

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 rainfall, and in some par-
oxysms of the tempest bent themselves in des-
perate submission, and then with a great shudder
rent away whole branches and flung them far off
upon the ground. Hail mingled with the rain,
and now the few umbrellas that had braved the
storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled
upon the pavement, where the lightning played
like flames burning from the earth, while the
thunder roared overhead without ceasing. There
was something splendidly theatrical about it all ;
and when a 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 potent reality in the affair,
and at intervals during the storm they debated
about going at all that day, and decided to go and
not to go, according to the changing complexion
of the elements. Basil had said that as this was
their first journey together in America, he wished
to give it at the beginning as pungent a national
character as possible, and that as he could im-
agine nothing more peculiarly American than a

Waiting at the De-bot

The Outset

voyage to New York by a Fall River boat, they
ought to take that route thither. So much up-
holstery, so much music, such variety of 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 eager-
ly consented ; but these aesthetic motives were
paralyzed for her by the thought of passing Point
Judith in a storm, and she descended from her
high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the
magnificence and the orchestra, and then to the
idea of going by land in a sleeping-car. Having
comfortably accomplished this feat, she treated
Basil's consent as a matter of course, not because
she did not regard him, but because as a woman
she could not conceive of the steps to her con-
clusion as unknown to him, and always treated
her own decisions as the product of their com-
mon 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 New-
port by the last express ; and it was this obsti-
nacy that, in proof of Isabel's wisdom, obliged
them to wait two hours in the station before
going by the land route. The storm abated at
five o'clock, and though the rain continued, it
seemed well by a quarter of seven to set out for

Their Wedding Journey

the Old Colony Depot, in sight of which a sud-
den and vivid flash of lightning caused Isabel to
seize her husband's arm, and to implore him, " Oh,
don't go by the boat ! " On this, Basil had the
incredible weakness to
yield ; and bade the driver
take them to the Worces-
ter 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 seven and nine o'clock
before them. Basil would have eked out the
business of checking the trunks into an affair
of some length, but the baggage-master did his
duty with pitiless celerity ; and so Basil, in the
mere excess of his disoccupation, bought an ac-
cident insurance ticket. This employed him
half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal
contest, and went and took his place beside

"Don't go by the boat ! "

77ie Outset n

Isabel, who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl,
perfectly content.

" Is n'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
did n't ! Do you remember how long we had to
wait at Chambery ? and the numbers of military
gentlemen that waited too, with their little
waists, and their kisses when they met ? and
that poor married military gentleman, with the
plain wife and the two children, and a tarnished
uniform ? He seemed to be somehow in mis-
fortune, and his mustache hung down in such a
spiritless way, while all the other military mus-
taches about curled and bristled with so much
boldness. I think salles d'attente everywhere
are delightful, and there is such a community
of interest in them all, that when I come here
only to go out to Brookline, I feel myself a
traveler once more, — a blessed stranger in a
strange land. Oh dear, Basil, those were happy
times after all, when we might have had each
other and did n't ! And now we 're the more
precious for having been so long lost."

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

12 Their Wedding Journey

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

"Never!" 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 did n't undertake to preserve
the incognito 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-room. To be sure, the ticket-seller was
there, and the lady who checked packages left
in her charge, but these must have seen so
many endearments pass between passengers,
that a fleeting caress or two would scarcely have
drawn their notice to our pair. Yet Isabel did
not so much even as put her hand into her hus-
band's ; and as Basil afterwards said, it was
very good practice.

Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often
mirrored in all that come near us, and our
friends were fated to meet frequent parodies of
their happiness from first to last on this jour-
ney. The travesty began with the very first
people who entered the waiting-room after them-
selves, and who were a very young couple start-
ing like themselves upon a pleasure tour, which

TJie Outset 13

also was evidently one of the first tours of any
kind that they had made. It was of modest
extent, and comprised going to New York and
back ; but they talked of it with a fluttered and
joyful expectation as if it were a voyage to
Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque
of their happiness (but with a touch of tragedy)
in that kind of young man who is called by the
females of his class a fellow, and two young
women of that kind known to him as girls. He
took a place between these, and presently began
a robust flirtation with one of them. He pos-
sessed himself, after a brief struggle, of her
parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with
a sort of tender rudeness, inconceivable vapidi-
ties, such as you would expect from none but
a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus
courted became selfishly unconscious of every-
thing but her own joy, and made no attempt to
bring the other girl within its warmth, but left
her to languish forgotten on the other side.
The latter sometimes leaned forward, and tried
to divert a little of the flirtation to herself, but
the flirters snubbed her with short answers, and
presently she gave up and sat still in the sad
patience of uncourted women. In this attitude
she became a burden to Isabel, who was glad
when the three took themselves away, and were
succeeded by a very stylish couple — from New

14 Their Wedding Journey

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-York-
eress 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 could n't do that, my poor Basil," said
Isabel, " you 'd be afraid."

" Oh dear, yes ; I 'm only too glad to get off
without browbeating ; though I must say that
this officer looks affable enough. Really," he
added, as an acquaintance of the ticket-seller
came in and nodded to him and said, " Hot, to-
day ! " " this is very strange. I always felt as
if these men had no private life, no friendships
like the rest of us. On duty they seem so like
sovereigns, set apart from mankind, and above
us all, that it 's quite incredible they should
have the common personal relations."

At intervals of their talk and silence there
came vivid flashes of lightning and quite heavy
shocks of thunder, very consoling to our friends,
who took them as so many compliments to their
prudence in not going by the boat, and who had
secret doubts of their wisdom whenever these
acknowledgments were withheld. Isabel went

The Otitset

so far as to say that she hoped nothing would
happen to the boat, but I think she would cheer-
fully have learned that the vessel 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 place.

People constantly came and went in the wait-
ing-room, which was sometimes quite full, and
again empty of all but themselves. In the course
of their observations they formed many cordial
friendships and bitter enmities upon the ground
of personal appearance,
or particulars of dress,
with people whom they
saw for half a minute
upon an average ; and
they took such a keen
interest in every one, that
it would be hard to say
whether they were more
concerned in an old gen-
tleman with vigorously
upright iron - gray hair,
who sat fronting them,
and reading all the even-
ing papers, or a young
man who hurled himself
through the door, bought

a ticket With terrific pre- Running for the Train

1 6 TJieir Wedding Journey

cipitation, 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 stub-
born benevolence of expression, and if they had
been friends of the young man and his family for
generations, and felt bound if any harm befell
him to go and break the news gently to his
parents, their nerves could not have been more
intimately wrought upon by his hazardous be-
havior. Still, as they had their tickets for New
York, and he was going out on a merely local
train, — to Brookline, I believe, — they could
not, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling of
contempt for his 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
Boston. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the
gas-jets as a gust of wind drew through the sta-
tion ; 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
travelers in a foreign country they noted and
approved the vases of cut flowers in the booth
of the lady who checked packages, and the pots
of ivy in her windows. " These poor Boston i-
ans," they said, "have some love of the beau-
tiful in their rugged natures."

The Outset

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

Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a
subtile interpretation of his uneasiness, "/don't
want anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know
the weaknesses of men ; and you had better go
and pass the next half hour over a plate of
something indigestible."

This was said con stizza, the least little sug-
gestion of it ; but Basil rose with shameful alac-
rity. " Darling, if it 's your wish " —

" It 's my fate, Basil," said Isabel.
— " I '11 go," he exclaimed, " because it is n't
bridal, and will help us to pass for old married
people."

" No. no, Basil, be honest ; fibbing is n't your
forte: I wonder you went into the insurance
business ; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go
because you like eating, and are hungry, per-
haps, 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
grievous to a wife when she recognizes a rival
in butchers'-meat and the vegetables of the sea-
son. With her slender relishes for pastry and
confectionery, and her dainty habits of lunch-
ing, she cannot reconcile with the ideal her
husband's capacity for breakfasting, dining, sup-

1 8 Their Wedding Journey

ping, 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 re-
curred now, as his figure disappeared down the
station, to memorable instances of his appetite
in their European travels during their first en-
gagement. " Yes, he ate terribly at Susa, when
I was too full of the notion of getting into Italy
to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At
Rome I thought I must break with him on ac-
count of the wild boar ; and at Heidelberg, the
sausage and the ham ! — how could he, in rny
presence ? But I took him with all his faults,
— and was glad to get him," she added, ending
her meditation with a little burst of candor ; and
she did not even think of Basil's appetite when
he reappeared.

With the thronging of many sorts of people,
in parties and singly, into the waiting-room,
they became once again mere observers of their
kind, more or less critical in temper, until the
crowd grew so that individual traits were merged
in the character of multitude. Even then, they
could catch glimpses of faces so sweet or fine
that they made themselves felt like moments of
repose in the tumult, and here and there was
something so grotesque in dress or manner that

The Outset 19

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 Or-
leans, Chicago, Omaha ; to St. Paul, Duluth, St.
Louis ; and it would not have been hard to find
in that anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness,
an image of the whole busy affair of life. It was
not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience
to be off to some place that lay not only in the
distance, but also in the future — to which no
line of road carries you with absolute certainty
across an interval of time full of every imagi-
nable 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 she arranged upon the seat. There the
invalid lay down, and turned towards the crowd
a white, suffering face, which was yet so heav-
enly meek and peaceful that it comforted who-
ever looked at it. In spirit our happy friends
bowed themselves before it and owned that
there was something better than happiness in it.

20 Their Wedding Journey

"What is it like, Isabel?"

"Oh, I don't know, darling," she said; but
she thought, " Perhaps it is like some blessed
sorrow that takes us out of this prison of a
world, and sets us free of our every-day hates
and desires, our aims, our fears, ourselves.
Maybe a long and mortal sickness might come
to wear such a face in one of us two, and the
other could see it, 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 unknown to each other ; but what was
said Basil would not ask when the invalid had
taken Isabel's hand between her own, as for
adieu, and she came back to his side with swim-
ming eyes. Perhaps his wife could have given
no good reason for her emotion, if he had asked
it. But it made her very sweet and dear to
him ; and I suppose that when a tolerably un-
selfish 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 bet-
ter, " How kind and good she is!"

They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of

The O tit set 21

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 pressing furiously through as if their lives
hung upon the chance of instant passage. Basil
had secured his ticket for the sleeping-car, and
so he and Isabel stood 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 de-
clares 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 sup-
pose, — except her father, who supports her
in the leisure that enables her to do her deep
thinking. She little knows what we poor fel-
lows have to suffer, and how often we break
down in business hours, and sob upon one an-
other's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in
the same strain ? "

22 Their Wedding Journey

" Oh no ! she spoke very calmly of her sick-
ness, and said she had lived a blessed life.
Perhaps it was that made me shed those few
small tears. She seemed a very religious per-
son."

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

"All aboard!"

This warning cry saved him from whatever
heresy he might have been about to utter ;
and presently 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 phenomenon whose commonness alone
prevents it from being most impressive, that
departure of the night express. The two hun-
dred 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
drawbridges 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 know-

The Outset

ledge of your helplessness in
any circumstances is so perfect
that it begets a sense of irre-
sponsibility, almost of secu-
rity ; and as you drowse upon
the pallet of the sleeping-car,
and feel yourself hurled for-
ward through the obscurity,
you are almost thankful that
you can do nothing, for it is
upon this condition only that
you can endure it ; and some
such condition as this, I sup-
pose, accounts for many heroic
facts in the world. To the fan-
tastic mood which possesses
you equally, sleeping or wak-
ing, the stoppages of the train
have a weird character ; and
Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stam-
ford are rather points in dreamland than well-
known towns of New England. As the train
stops you drowse if you have been waking, and
wake if you have been in a doze ; but in any
case you are aware of the locomotive hissing
and coughing beyond the station, of flaring gas-
jets, of clattering feet of passengers getting on
and off ; then of some one, conductor or station-
master, walking the whole length of the train ;

A Night Scene

24 Their Wedding Journey

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 public, and I 've a fancy for not go-
ing to a hotel. Lucy will be expecting us out
there before noon ; and we can pass the time
pleasantly enough for a few hours just wander-
ing about." She was a woman who loved any
cheap defiance of custom, and she had an agree-
able sense of adventure in what she proposed.
Besides, she felt that nothing could be more
in the unconventional spirit in which they
meant to make their whole journey than a
stroll about New York at half past six in the
morning.

" Delightful ! " answered Basil, who was al-
ways charmed with these small originalities.
" You look well enough for an evening party ;
and besides, you won't meet one of your own
critical class on Broadway at this hour. We

The Outset

will breakfast at one of those gilded metropol-
itan restaurants, and then go round to Leon-
ard's, who will be able to give us just three
unhurried seconds. After that we '11 push on
out to his place."

At that early hour there were not many peo-
ple 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 some-
thing that told of a
greater heat than they
had yet known in Bos-
ton, and they were sen-
sible of having reached
a more southern lati-
tude. The air, though
freshened by the over-
night's storm, still
wanted the briskness
and sparkle and pun-
gency of the Boston air,
which is as delicious in
summer as it is terri-
ble 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

Early Morning

26 Their Wedding Journey

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 confronted the advancing
sunlight, before which the long shadows of the
buildings were slowly retiring. A marketing
mother of a family paused at a provision store,
and looking weakly in at the white-aproned
butcher among his meats and flies, passed with-
out 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, with a good cigar
in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the
elbow of one of the arms holding up the paper
from which the morning's news is snatched,
whilst the person sways lightly with the walk ;
in the street-cars that slowly tinkled up and
down were rows of people with baskets between
their legs and papers before their faces ; and all
showed by some peculiarity of air or dress the
excess of heat which they had already borne,
and to which they seemed to look forward, and
gave by the scantiness of their number a vivid
impression of the uncounted thousands within

The Outset 27

doors prolonging, before the day's terror began,
the oblivion of sleep.

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

"A city against the world's gray Prime,
Lost in some desert, far from Time,
Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
Have only sifted 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 of 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."

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

28 Their Wedding Journey

" You could have been as good a poet as that,
Basil," said the ever personal and concretely
speaking Isabel, who could not look at a moun-
tain without thinking what Basil might have
done in that way, if he had tried.

" Oh no, I could n't, dear. It 's very difficult
being any poet at all, though it 's easy to be like
one. But I Ve done with it ; I broke with the
Muse the day you accepted me. She came into
my office, looking so shabby, — not unlike one
of those poor shop-girls ; and as I was very
well dressed from having just been to see you,
why, you know, I felt the difference. ' Well,
my dear ? ' said I, not quite liking the look of
reproach she was giving me. ' You are going
to leave me,' she answered, sadly. ' Well, yes ;
I suppose I must. You see the insurance busi-
ness is very absorbing ; and besides, it has a
bad appearance, your coming about so in office
hours, and in those clothes.' ' Oh/ she moaned
out, 'you used to welcome me at all times,
out in the country, and thought me prettily
dressed.' ' Yes, yes ; but this is Boston ; and
Boston makes a great difference in one's ideas ;
and I 'm going to be married, too. Come, I
don't want to seem ungrateful ; we have had
many pleasant times together, I own it ; and
I Ve no objections to your being present at
Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays,

The Outset 29

but really I must draw the line there/ She
gave me a look that made my heart ache, and
went straight to my desk and took out of a
pigeon-hole a lot of papers, — odes upon your
cruelty, Isabel; songs to you; sonnets, — the
sonnet, a mighty poor one, I 'd made the day
before, — and threw them all into the grate.
Then she turned to me again, signed adieu with
mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the
bottom wire of the poor thing's hoop-skirt click-
ing against each step of the stairway, as she
went slowly and heavily down to the street."

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

" Ashamed ! I was heart-broken. But it
had to come to that. As I got hopeful about
you, the Muse became a sad bore ; and more
than once I found myself smiling at her when
her back was turned. The Muse does n't like
being laughed at any more than another woman
would, and she would have left me shortly.
No, I could n'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 doorsteps and the
pavement in front of her own house, and then

30 Their Wedding Journey

knocked her broom on the curbstone and van-
ished into the house, on which the hand of
change had already fallen. It was no longer a
street solely devoted to the domestic gods, but
had been invaded at more than one point by
the bustling deities of business : in such streets
the irregular, inspired doctors and doctresses
come first with inordinate door-plates, then a
milliner filling the parlor window with new bon-
nets ; here even a publisher had hung his sign
beside a door, through which the feet of young
ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children
to patter. Here and there stood groups of
dwellings unmolested as yet outwardly ; but
even these had a certain careworn and guilty
air, as if they knew themselves to be cheapish
boarding-houses or furnished lodgings for gen-
tlemen, and were trying to hide it. To these
belonged the frowzy serving-women ; to these
the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit
children and mothers of the streets were claw-
ing for bits of coal.

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway
there were already some omnibuses beginning
their long day's travel up and down the hand-
some, tiresome length of that avenue ; but for
the most part it was empty. There was, of
course, a hurry of foot-passengers upon the side-
walks, but these were sparse and uncharacter-

The Outset 31

istic, for New York proper was still fast asleep.
The waiter at the restaurant into which our
friends stepped was so well aware of this, and so
perfectly assured they were not of the city, that
he could not forbear a little patronage of them,
which they did not resent. He brought Basil
what he had ordered in barbaric abundance, and
charged for it with barbaric splendor. It is all
but impossible not to wish to stand well with
your waiter : I have myself been often treated
with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet I
have never been able to withhold the douceur
that marked me for a gentleman in their eyes,
and entitled me to their dishonorable esteem.
Basil was not superior to this folly, and left the
waiter with the conviction that, if he was not
a New Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the
world at any 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-demolished walls of a house,
with a sad variety of wall-paper showing in the

32 Their Wedding Journey

different rooms ; there clinked the trowel upon
the brick, yonder the hammer on the stone ; over-
head swung and threatened the marble block
that the derrick was lifting to its place. As yet
these forces of demolition and construction had
the business of the street almost to 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."

" Ah ! but you were merely coming from Eu-
rope then ; and now you arrive from Boston, and
are contrasting this poor Broadway with Wash-
ington Street. Don't be hard upon it, Isabel ;
every street can't be a Boston street, you know,"
said Basil. Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great
intensity both by birth and conviction, believed
her husband the only man able to have thor-
oughly baffled the malignity of the stars in
causing him to be born out of Boston ; yet he
sometimes trifled with his hardly achieved tri-
umph, and even showed an indifference to it, with
an insincerity of which there can be no doubt
whatever.

" Oh 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

The Outset 33

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 '11 allow its disheartening shabbi-
ness 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 move-
ment and the numbers, while the Niagara roar
swelled and swelled from those human rapids,
was always like strong new wine to me. I don't
think the world affords such another sight ; and
for one moment, at such times, I 'd have been
willing to be an Irish councilman, that I might
have some right to the pride I felt in the capital
of the Irish Republic. What a fine thing it must
be for each victim of six centuries of oppression
to reflect that he owns at least a dozen Ameri-
cans, and that, with his fellows, he rules a hun-
dred 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
buoyantly, but she was glad to make her weari-
ness the occasion of hailing a stage, and chang-
ing the conversation. The farther down town
they went the busier the street grew ; and

34 Their Wedding Journey

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 Bos-
ton. A little farther on, the steeple of Trinity
rose high into the scorching sunlight, while
below, in the shadow that was darker than it
was cool, slumbered the old graves among their
flowers.

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

" Yes, their 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 ap-
peared so impossible that they both smiled at
the absurdity.

"It's too early yet for Leonard," continued
Basil ; " what a pity the churchyard is locked
up. We could spend the time so delightfully
in it. But, never mind ; let us go down to the
Battery, — it's not a very pleasant place, but
it's near, and it's historical, and it's open, —
where these drowsy friends of ours used to take
the air when they were in the fashion, and had
some occasion for the element in its freshness.
You can imagine — it's cheap — how they
used to see Mr. Burr and Mr. Hamilton down
there."

All places that fashion has once loved and

Trinity Churchyard

The Outset 37

abandoned 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 ref-
use and opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper
vegetation proper solely to the New York Bat-
tery. At that hour of the summer morning
when our friends, with the aimlessness of
strangers who are waiting to do something else,
saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and
hungry-eyed little boys and girls were wander-
ing over this weedy growth, not playing, but
moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the
wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these
little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary
jauntiness, the cast-off best dress of some hap-
pier child, a gay little garment cut low in the
neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her
the grotesque effect of having been at a party
the night before. Presently came two jaded
women, a mother and a grandmother, that ap-
peared, when they had crawled out of their
beds, to have put on only so much clothing as
the law compelled. They abandoned them-
selves upon the green stuff, whatever it was,

38 Their Wedding Journey

and, with their lean hands clasped outside their
knees, sat and stared, silent and hopeless, at the
eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible fur-
nace, 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 some-
how 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
final dishonor and despair. Down nearer the
water, and not far from the castle that was once
a playhouse and is now the depot of emigra-
tion, stood certain express-wagons, and about
these lounged a few hard - looking men. Be-
yond laughed and danced the fresh blue water
of the bay, dotted with sails and smokestacks.

" Well," said Basil, " I think if I could choose,
I should like to be a friendless German boy, set-
ting foot for the first time on this happy con-
tinent. Fancy his rapture on beholding this
lovely spot, and these charming American faces !
What a smiling aspect life in the New World
must wear to his young eyes, and how his heart
must leap within him ! "

The Outset 39

" 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 whil-
ing away the long morning hours until it should
be time to go to Leonard. He protested that a
knowledge of Europe made New York the most
uninteresting town in America, and that it was
the last place in the world where he should
think of amusing himself or any one else ; and
then they both upbraided the city's bigness and
dullness with an enjoyment that none but Bos-
tonians can know. They particularly derided
the notion of New York's being loved by any
one. It was immense, it was grand in some
ways, parts of it were exceedingly handsome ;
but it was too vast, too coarse, too restless.
They could imagine its being liked by a suc-
cessful young man of business, or by a rich
young girl, ignorant of life and with not too
nice a taste in her pleasures ; but that it should
be dear to any poet or scholar, or any woman of
wisdom and refinement, that they could not
imagine. They could not think of any one's

4° Their Wedding Journey

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
night's sleep and becoming aware of her fleets
and trains, and the myriad hands and wheels
that throughout the whole sea and land move
for her, and do her will even while she sleeps.
All about the wedding-journeyers 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 she was
interrupting him with, "When who could have
dreamed that you would ever be telling me of it

The Outset 41

here ? " So the old marvel was wondered over
anew, till it filled the world in which there was
room for nothing but the strangeness that they
should have loved each other so long and not
made it known, that they should ever have
uttered it, and that, being uttered, it should
be so much more and better than ever could
have been dreamed. The broken engagement
was a fable of disaster that only made their
present fortune more prosperous. The city
ceased about them, and they walked on up the
street, the first man and first woman in the gar-
den of the new-made earth. As they were both
very conscious people, they recognized in them-
selves 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 should n't call snakes
snakes; should you, Eve?" laughed Basil in
intricate acknowledgment of his happiness.

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

/. II

A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM

THEY had waited to see Leonard, in order
that they might learn better how to find his
house in the country ; and now, when they came
in upon him at nine o'clock, he welcomed them
with all his friendly heart. He rose from the
pile of morning's letters to which he had but
just sat down ; he placed them the easiest
chairs ; he made a feint of its not being a busy
hour with him, and would have had them look
upon his office, which was still damp and odor-
ous from the porter's broom, as a kind of down-
town parlor ; but after they had briefly accounted
to his amazement for their appearance then and
there, and Isabel had boasted of the original
fashion in which they had that morning seen
New York, they took pity on him, and bade him
adieu till evening.

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

"Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, " that

In Leonard's Office

A Midsummer-Day s Dream 45

Leonard travels fifty miles every day by rail
going to 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, are n'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
suspects the excitements which a long descrip-
tion of the movement would delay. The ladies
were very old friends, and they had not met
since Isabel's return from Europe and renewal
of her engagement. Upon the news of this,
Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising
ease all that she had said in blame of Basil's
conduct during the rupture, and exacted a
promise from her friend that she should pay her
the first visit after their marriage. And now
that they had come together, their only talk
was of husbands, whom they viewed in every
light to which husbands could be turned, and
still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme.
Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend's joy the
sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and

46 Their Wedding Journey

Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous
marriage of the former as the image of her fu-
ture. 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 circum-
stances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged
each other in their absurdity. The absurdity
appeared too good and blessed to be true. " Do
you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to
her oppressor, after having given him some ele-
gant extract from the last conversation upon
husbands, " that we shall get on as smoothly as
the Leonards when we have been married ten
years ? Lucy says that things go more hitchily
the first year than ever they do afterwards, and
that people love each other better and better
just because they 've got used to it. Well, our
bliss does seem a little crude and garish com-
pared with their happiness ; and yet " — she
put up both her palms against his, and gave
a vehement little push — " there is something
agreeable about it, even at this stage of the pro-
ceedings."

ffr

Talking their fJitsbauds over

A Midsummer-Day s Dream 49

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

" No matter ! I only want to seem an old
married woman to the general public. But the
application of it is that you must be careful not
to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so
that we can be like the Leonards very much
sooner than they became so. The great object
is not to have any hitchiness ; and you know
you are provoking — at times."

They both educated themselves for continued
and tranquil happiness by the example and pre-
cept 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 as-
pire to unite the enjoyment of both in their
daily existence. The suburbs of the metropolis
stretch landward fifty miles in every direction ;
and everywhere are handsome villas like Leon-
ard's, inhabited by men like himself, whom strict
study of the time-table enables to spend all their
working hours in the city and all their smoking
and sleeping hours in the country.

The home and the neighborhood of the Leon-
ards put on their best looks for our bridal pair,

5° Their Wedding Journey

and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the
visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry
to have it come to an end ; yet they all resigned
themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it
had no other result than to detain the travelers
into the very heart of the hot weather. In that
weather it was easy to do anything that did not
require an active effort, and resignation was so
natural with the mercury at ninety, that I 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. Be-
sides, it would bring them to Albany at an hour
when they must either spend the night there or
push on to Niagara by the night train. " You
had better go by the evening boat. It will be
light almost till you reach West Point, and you '11
see all the best scenery. Then you can get a
good night's rest, and start fresh in the morn-
ing." So they were counseled, and they as-
sented, as they would have done if they had
been advised : " You had better go by the
morning boat. It 's deliciously cool, traveling ;
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."

A Midsummer-Day s Dream 51

They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and
of his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later
they were rushing from the heat of the country
into the heat of the city, where some affairs and
pleasures were to employ them till the evening
boat should start.

Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell
of the great heat brooded upon them. All
abroad burned the fierce white light of the sun,
in which not only the earth seemed to parch
and thirst, but the very air withered, and was
faint and thin to the troubled respiration.
Their train was full of people who had come
long journeys from broiling cities of the West,
and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in
the slumbers at which some of them still vainly
caught. On every one lay an awful languor.
Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken
wing of a dying bird ; now and then a swelter-
ing 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 gasp 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.

52 Their Wedding Journey

Yet when they arrived at the station by the
ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its
stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmos-
phere, 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
thermometer, before which every passenger, on
going aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a
shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the
altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and
saw that the mercury was above ninety, and
exulting with the pride that savages take in the
cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to
the great god Heat.

On the boat they found a place where the
breath of the sea struck cool across their faces,
and made them forget the thermometer for the
brief time of the transit. But presently they
drew near that strange, irregular row of wooden
buildings and jutting piers which skirts the
river on the New York side, and before the
boat's motion ceased the air grew thick and
warm again, and tainted with the foulness of

. A Midsummer-Day s Dream 53

the street on which the buildings front. Upon
this the boat's passengers issued, passing up
through a gangway, on one side of which a
throng of return-passengers was pent by a gate
of iron bars, like a herd of wild animals. They
were streaming with perspiration, and, accord-
ing 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
better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate
sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage there, or take
one of these cars here, and be landed a little
nearer, with half the exertion. By this route
we shall have sights and smells which the other
can't offer us, but whichever we take we shall
be sorry."

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

They hailed the first car that passed, and got
into it. Well for them both if she could have
exercised this philosophy with regard to the
whole day's business, or if she could have given
up her plans for it with the same resignation
she had practiced in regard to the day boat !
It seems to me a proof of the small advance
our race has made in true wisdom, that we find

54 Their Wedding Journey .

it so hard to give up doing anything we have
meant to do. It matters very little whether the
affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we
feel the same bitter need, of pursuing it to the
end. The mere fact of intention gives it/a
flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one may call
the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life
that we have scarcely a sense any more of the
sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We
will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a delib-
erate dereliction ; the gentle sin of omission is
all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes.
If I had been Columbus, I should have thought
twice before setting sail, when I was quite ready
to do so ; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should
have sternly resisted the blandishments of those
twin sirens, Starvation and Cold, who beckoned
the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as ever I
came in sight of their granite perch should have
turned back to England. But it is now too late
to repair these errors, and so, on one of the
hottest days of last year, behold my obdurate
bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue
horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment of
a series of intentions, any of which had wise-
lier been left unaccomplished. Isabel had said
they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth
Street, and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming
and staging and variously cooling and calming

A Midsummer-Day's Dream 55

by the way, until they reached the ticket-office
on Broadway, whence they could indefinitely
betake themselves to the steamboat an hour or
two before her departure. She felt that they
had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and
conditions already on this journey, and she was
resolved that the present 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 rankly grow and grow as from
his life's blood will only lay down his load when
he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze in
upon heart and brain ; the plethoric millionaire
for whom he toils will plot and plan in his office
till he swoons at the desk ; the trembling beast
must stagger forward while the 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 unspared and unsparing weariness of sell-

TJieir Wedding Journey

ing ; in the street, filled by the hurry and suffer-
ing 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 pilgrim-
age through that squa-
lid street by the river-
side, where presently
they came to a market
opening upon the view
hideous vistas of car-
nage, and then into a
wide avenue, with pro-
cessions of cars like
their own coming and
going up and down the
centre of a foolish and
useless breadth, which

made even the tall buildings (rising gauntly up
among 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

A Hot Sidewalk

A Midsummer-Days Dream 57

and sent swirling into the shabby shops. Here
they dreamed of the eternal demolition and
construction of the city, and farther on of va-
cant lots full of granite boulders, clambered
over by goats. In their dream they had fellow-
passengers, whose sufferings made them odious
and whom they were glad to leave behind when
they alighted from the car, and running out of
the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselves
in the shade of the cross street. A little strip
of shadow lay along the row of brown-stone
fronts, but there were intervals where the va-
cant lots cast no shadow. With great bestowal
of thought they studied hopelessly how to
avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult
torrents or vast expanses of desert sand ; they
crept slowly along till they came to such a
place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then,
fainter than before, moved on. They seemed
now and then to stand at doors, and to be told
that people were out, and again that they were
in ; and they had a sense of cool dark parlors,
and the airy rustling of 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
visits, and of a purpose to go down town again,
and of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks

58 Their Wedding Journey

of brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal
brown-stone flights of steps, and their hand-
some, intolerable uniformity, oppressed them
like a procession of houses trying to pass a
given point and never getting by. Upon these
streets there was seldom a soul to be seen, so
that when their ringing at a door had evoked
answer, it had startled them with a vague, sad
surprise. In the distance on either hand they
could see cars and carts and wagons toiling
up and down the avenues, and on the next
intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with
his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog
that had plainly made up his mind to go mad.
Up to the time of their getting into one of
those phantasmal cars for the return down-
townwards they had kept up a show of talk
in their wretched dream ; they had spoken of
other hot days that they had known elsewhere ;
and they had wondered that the tragical char-
acter of heat had been so little recognized.
They said that the daily New York murder
might even at that moment be somewhere tak-
ing place ; and that no murder of the whole
homicidal year could have such proper circum-
stance ; they morbidly wondered what that day's
murder would be, and in what swarming tene-
ment-house, or den of the assassin streets by
the river-sides, — if indeed it did not befall in

Cool, Dark Parlors

A Midsummer-Day's Dream 61

some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwell-
ing 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 moun-
tains or the seaside. They conjectured of the
horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the
anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical
coast, and the grimy misery of stevedores un-
loading 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 ques-
tioned when it was and from what far city
they or some remote ancestors of theirs had
set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade
each other a tacit farewell, and with patient,
pathetic faces awaited the end of the world.

When they alighted, they took their way up
through one of the streets of the great whole-
sale businesses, to Broadway. On this street
was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and
unlading ; bales and boxes rose and sank by
pulleys overhead ; the footway was a labyrinth
of packages of every shape and size : there was
no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all
forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on

62 TJieir Wedding Journey

it, save in the reeking faces of its helpless
instruments. But when the wedding-journeyers
emerged upon Broadway, the other passages
and incidents of their dream faded before the
superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was
four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly
summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have
a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the
gloom of 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 atmos-
phere, and far up and down the length of the
street swept a stream of tormented life. All
sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous
among which rolled and jarred the gaudily
painted stages, with quivering horses driven
each by a man who sat in the shade of a
branching white umbrella, and suffered with a
moody truculence of aspect, and as if he har-
bored the bitterness of death in his heart for
the crowding passengers within, when one of
them pulled the strap about his legs, and sum-
moned him to halt. Most of the foot-passen-

A Midsummer-Day s Dream

gers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccus-
tomed eyes of the strangers they were not less
in number than at any other time, though there

/ cant stand this much longer

were fewer women among them. Indomitably
resolute of soul, they held their course with the
swift pace of custom, and only here and there
they showed the effect of the heat. One man,

64 TJieir Wedding Journey

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. Another, as they passed him,
was saying huskily to the friend at his side, " I
can't stand this much longer. My hands tingle
as if they had gone to sleep; my heart" —
But still the multitude hurried on, passing,
repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing
into shop-doors and emerging from them, dis-
persing down the side streets, and swarming out
of them. It was a scene that possessed the
beholder with singular fascination, and in its
effect of universal lunacy it might well have
seemed the last phase of a world presently to
be destroyed. They who were in it but not of
it, as they fancied, — though there was no rea-
son for this, — looked on it amazed, and at last,
their own errands being accomplished, and
themselves so far cured of the madness of pur-
pose, 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 entered they heard the next comer
cry out with a maniacal pride in the affliction
laid upon ^mankind, " Ninety-seven degrees ! "

A Midsummer-Day s Dream 65

Behind them at the door there poured in a
ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at the
shrine of heat, before he tossed off the hissing
draught that two pale, 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 handkerchief full of pounded ice, and
easing one hand with the other when the first
became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused
to look upon this group, which he felt would
commend itself to realistic sculpture as emi-
nently characteristic of the local life, and as
" The Sunstroke " would sell enormously in the
hot season. " Better take a little more of
that," the apothecary said, looking up from his
prescription, and, as the organized sympathy of
the seemingly indifferent crowd, smiling very
kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted
something in the glass he held. " Do you still
feel like fainting ? " asked the humane author-
ity. "Slightly, now and then," answered the
other, "but I 'm hanging on hard to the bottom

66 Their Wedding Journey

curve of that icicled S on your soda-fountain,
and I feel that I 'm all right as long as I can
see that. The people get rather hazy, occasion-
ally, 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 embarrassments.

" Oh, you '11 do ! " the apothecary answered,
with a laugh ; but he said, in answer to an
anxious question from the lady, "He mustn't
be moved for an hour yet," and gayly pestled
away at a prescription, while she resumed her
office of grinding the pounded ice round and
round upon her husband's skull. Isabel offered
her the commiseration of friendly words, and of
looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they
could do nothing, she and Basil fell into the
endless procession, and passed out of the side
door.

" What a shocking thing ! " she whispered.
"Did you see how all the people looked, one
after another, so indifferently at that couple,
and evidently forgot them the next instant ?
It was dreadful. I shouldn't like to have you
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

A Midsummer-Day s Dream 67

have it in New York. The biggest place is
always the kindest as well as the crudest place.
Amongst the thousands of spectators the good
Samaritan as well as the Levite 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 expe-
rience of calamity there that you could hardly
fall the first victim to any misfortune. Prob-
ably the gentleman at the apothecary's was
merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there
for revival. The apothecary has a case of the
kind on his hands every blazing afternoon, and
knows just what to do. The crowd may be
a little ennuyt 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 au-
thority, and go about their business. If a man
was overcome in the middle of a village street,
the blundering country druggist would n'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

68 Their Wedding Journey

as if they saw a human being in trouble. Per-
haps I 'm a little exacting."

" I think you are. Nothing is so hard as to
understand that there are human beings in this
world besides one's self and one's set. But let
us be selfishly thankful that it is n'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 's over, to have seen the
worst."

Ill

THE NIGHT BOAT

THERE is little proportion about either pain
or pleasure : a headache darkens the universe
while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the
spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations.
Therefore I do not think it trivial or untrue to
say that there is for the moment nothing more
satisfactory in life than to have bought your
ticket on the night boat up the Hudson and
secured your stateroom key an hour or two
before departure, and some time even before
the pressure at the clerk's office has begun.
In the transaction with this castellated baron,
you have of course been treated with haughti-
ness, but not with ferocity, and your self-respect
swells with a sense of having escaped positive
insult ; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket
against its gutta-percha number, and you walk
up 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 aristocratic gloom of the yellow

Their Wedding Journey

waiters. Your own stateroom, 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 mar-
ble-topped wash-stand.
In the mere wanton-
ness 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 way-
farer experiences s o
much pleasure from
these things, then im-
agine the infinite com-
fort of our wedding-
journeyers, trans-
ported 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 fresh-
ness in the air. They disposed of their troubling
bags and packages ; they complimented the ridic-

Your own Stateroom

The Night Boat

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

A Sheltered Space aft of the Saloon.

tranquiller observance of the wharf and what-
ever 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

72 Their Wedding- Journey

of them apparently the worse for the ordeal
they had passed through, were of a light, con-
versational 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 at 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 steam-
boat, but spend our lives in perpetual trips up
and down the Hudson."

To which not very costly banter Isabel re-
sponded in kind, and rapidly sketched the life
they could lead aboard. Since they could not
help it, they mocked the public provision which,
leaving no interval between disgraceful squalor
and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our dem-
ocratic me'nage to the taste of the richest and
most extravagant plebeian amongst us. He,
unhappily, minds danger and oppression as

The Night Boat 73

little as he minds money, so long as he has
a spectacle and a sensation, and it is this ruth-
less imbecile who will have lace curtains to the
steamboat berth into which he gets with his
pantaloons on, and out of which he may be
blown by an exploding boiler at any moment ;
it is he who will have for supper that overgrown
and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon, and
will not let any one else buy tea or toast for
a less sum than he pays for his surfeit ; it is
he who perpetuates the insolence of the clerk
and the reluctance of the waiters ; it is he, in
fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with
his womenkind, and takes chairs under the
awning where Basil and Isabel sit. Personally,
he is not so bad ; he is 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

Their Wedding Journey

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

A rriving Passengers

arriving passengers, who, as the moment of
departure drew near, appeared in constantly
increasing numbers and in greater variety, with
not only the trepidation of going upon them,
but also with the electrical excitement people

The Night Boat 75

feel before a tempest. The breast of the black
cloud was now zigzagged from moment to mo-
ment by lightning, and claps of deafening
thunder broke from it. At last the long endur-
ance of the day was spent, and out of its con-
vulsion burst floods of rain, again and again
sweeping the promenade-deck where the people
sat, and driving them disconsolate into the
saloon. The air was darkened as by night, and
with many regrets for the vanishing prospect,
mingled with a sense of relief from the heat,
our friends felt the boat tremble away from her
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 declaring 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 celebrated their departure
upon some stoned river from some more ro-
mantic port than New York, they would have
thaught it an admirable thing. Even whilst
they contented themselves, the storm passed,
and left a veiled and humid sky overhead, that

Their Wedding Journey

gave a charming softness to the scene on which
their eyes fell when they came out of the saloon
again, and took their places with a largely in-
creased companionship on the deck.

They had already reached that part of the
river where the uplands begin, and their course
was between stately walls of rocky steepness, or
wooded slopes, or grassy hollows, the scene for-

ever 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 twin-
kled 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 boats grappled together, and, having an
air of coziness in their adventure upon this
strange current out of their own sluggish waters,
drifted out of sight ; and now a smaller and
slower steamer, making a laborious show of keep-
ing up, was passed, and reluctantly fell behind ;

From the Deck

The Night Boat 77

along the water's edge rattled and hooted the
frequent trains. They could not tell at any
time what part of the river they were on, and
they could not, if they would, have made its
beauty a matter of conscientious observation ;
but all the more, therefore, they deeply enjoyed
it without reference to time or place. They felt
some natural pain when they thought that they
might unwittingly pass the scenes that Irving
has made part of the common 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 discovering Sunnyside on every
pleasant slope. By virtue of this helplessness,
the Hudson, without ceasing to be the Hudson,
became from moment to moment all fair and
stately streams upon which they had voyaged
or read of voyaging, from the Nile to the 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 constant delight of the eyes in the
changing landscape, the soft tremor of the boat
so steady upon her keel, the variety of the little
world on board, — all form a charm which no

7 8 Their Wedding Journey

good heart in a sound body can resist. So,
whilst the twilight held, well content, in con-
tiguous chairs, they purred in flattery of their
kindly fate, imagining different pleasures, cer-
tainly, but none greater, and tasting to its
subtlest flavor the happiness conscious of itself.

Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so inter-
esting to them in this objective light, that they
had little desire to turn from its contemplation
to the people around them ; and when at last
they did so, it was still with lingering glances
of self-recognition and enjoyment. They di-
vined rightly that one of the main conditions of
their present felicity was the fact that they had
seen so much of time and of the world, that
they had no longer any desire to take beholding
eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure,
and they understood that their prosperous love
accounted as much as years and travel for this
result. If they had had a loftier opinion of
themselves, their indifference to others might
have made them offensive ; but with their
modest estimate of their own value in the
world, they could have all the comfort of self-
sufficiency, without its vulgarity.

" Oh yes ! " said Basil, in answer to some
apostrophe to their bliss from Isabel, " it 's the
greatest imaginable satisfaction to have lived
past certain things. I always knew that I was

The Night Boat 79

not a very handsome or otherwise captivating
person, but I can remember years — now
blessedly remote — when I never could see a
young girl without hoping she would mistake
me for something of that sort. I could n't help
desiring that some fascination of mine, which
had escaped my own analysis, would have an
effect upon her. I dare say all young men are
so. I used to live for the possible interest I
might inspire in your sex, Isabel. They con-
trolled my movements, my attitudes; they for-
bade me repose ; and yet I believe I was no ass,
but a tolerably sensible fellow. Blessed be
marriage, I am free at last ! All the loveliness
that exists outside of you, dearest, — and it 's
mighty little, — is mere pageant to me ; and I
thank Heaven that I can meet the most stylish
girl now upon the broad level of our common
humanity. Besides, it seems to me that our
experience of life has quieted us in many other
ways. What a luxury it is to sit here, and
reflect that we do not want any of these people
to suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beauti-
ful, 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 nearest them, — a young man of the
second or third quality and two young girls.

8o Their Wedding Journey

The eldest of these was carrying on a vivacious
flirtation with the young man, who was appar-
ently an acquaintance of brief standing ; the
other was scarcely more than a child, and sat
somewhat abashed at the sparkle of the collo-
quy. They were conjecturally sisters going
home from some visit, and not skilled in the
world, but of a certain repute in their country
neighborhood for beauty and wit. The young
man presently gave himself out as one who, in
pursuit of trade for the dry-goods house he
represented, had traveled many thousands of
miles in all parts of the country. The encoun-
ter was visibly that kind of adventure which
both would treasure up for future celebration to
their different friends ; and it had a brilliancy
and interest which they could not even now
consent to keep to themselves. They talked to
each other and at all the company within hear-
ing, and exchanged curt speeches which had for
them all the sensation of repartee.

Young Man. They say that beauty un-
adorned 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.

The Night Boat 81

(Titter from the younger sister.)

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

Young Man. Nobody else has, either, /
should say. (Admiringly.)

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

Young Man. " Whole team and big dog
under the wagon," as they say out West.

Young Woman. Better a big dog than a
puppy, any day.

(Giggles and horror from the younger sister,
sensation in the young man, and so much rap-
ture in the young woman that she drops the
key of her stateroom from her hand. They
both stoop, and a jocose scuffle for it ensues,
after which the talk takes an autobiographical
turn on the part of the young man, and drops
into an unintelligible murmur. Ah ! poor Real
Life, which I love, can I make others share the
delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face ?)

Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one
young and the other old, talking of some busi-
ness 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

82 Their Wedding Journey

importance, and toadying to him with the plea-
sure which all young men feel in winning the
favor of seniors in their vocation. " Well, as I
was a-say'n', Isaac don't seem to haf no natch-
eral pent for the glothing business. Man gomes
in and wands a goat," — he seemed to be speak-
ing of a garment and not a domestic animal, —
" Isaac 11 zell him the goat he wands him to puy,
and he '11 make him believe it 's the goat he was
a-lookin' for. Well, now, that 's well enough as
far as it goes ; but yon know and / know, Mr.
Rosenthal, that that 's no way to do business.
A man gan't zugzeed that goes upon that brin-
cible. Id 's wrong. Id 's easy enough to make
a man puy the goat you want him to, if he
wands a goat, but the thing is to make him puy
the goat that yon wand to zell when he dont
wand no goat at all. You 've asked me what I
thought and I 've dold you. Isaac '11 never zug-
zeed 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
engine, " I was afraid of something of the kind.
As you say, Benjamin, he don't seem to have
no pent for it. And yet I proughd him up to
the business ; I drained him to it, myself."

Besides these talkers, there were scattered

The Night Boat 83

singly, or grouped about in twos and threes and
fours, the various people one encounters on
a Hudson River boat, who are on the whole
different from the passengers on other rivers,
though they all have features in common.
There was that man of the sudden gains, who
has already been typified ; and there was also
the smoother rich man of inherited wealth, from
whom you can somehow know the former so
readily. They were each attended by their sev-
eral retinues of womankind, the daughters all
much alike, but the mothers somewhat differ-
ent. They were going to Saratoga, where per-
haps the exigencies of fashion would bring them
acquainted, and where the blue blood of a
quarter of a century would be kind to the yes-
terday's fluid of warmer hue. There was some-
thing pleasanter in the face of the hereditary
aristocrat, but not so strong, nor, altogether, so
admirable ; particularly if you reflected that he
really represented nothing in the world, no
great culture, no political influence, no civic
aspiration, not even a pecuniary force, nothing
but a social set, an alien club-life, a tradition of
dining. We live in a true fairy-land after all,
where the hoarded treasure turns to a heap of
dry leaves. The almighty dollar defeats itself,
and finally buys nothing that a man cares to
have. The very highest pleasure that such an

Their Wedding Journey

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 be glad.

We can be as glad, apparently, and with the
same reason, as the
poorly dressed young
man standing near be-
side the guard, whose
face Basil and Isabel
chose to fancy that of a
poet, and concerning
whom they romanced
that he was going home,
wherever his home was,
with the manuscript of
a rejected book in his
pocket. They imagined
him no great things of
a poet, to be sure, but
his pensive face claimed

The Poorly Dressed Young Man

delicate feeling for him,
and a graceful, sombre
fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught
flavors of Tennyson and Browning in his verse,
with a moderner tint from Morris, for was it
not a story out of mythology, with gods and he-
roes of the nineteenth century, that he was
now carrying back from New York with him ?

The Night Boat 85

Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-
accepted disappointments a moving little picture
of this poor imagined poet's adventures ; with
what kindness and unkindness he had been put
to shame by publishers, and how, descending
from his high hopes of a book, he had tried to
sell to the magazines some of the shorter pieces
out of the " And other Poems " which were to
have filled up the volume. " He 's going back
rather stunned and bewildered ; but it 's some-
thing to have tasted the city, and its bitter may
turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till he finds
himself longing for the tumult that he abhors
now. Poor fellow ! one compassionate cut-
throat of a publisher even asked him to lunch,
being struck, as we are, with something fine in
his face. I hope he 's got somebody who
believes in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be
more comfortable, for the present, if he went
over the railing there."

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 ele-
ments, indeed, of either were at work there, and
this was but one brief scene of the immense
complex drama which was to proceed so

86 Their Wedding Journey

variously in such different times and places,
and to have its denouement only in eternity.
The contrasts were sharp : each group had its
travesty in some other ; the talk of one seemed
the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the
next ; but of all these parodies none was so
terribly effective as the two women, who sat in
the midst of the company, yet were somehow
distinct from the rest. One wore the deepest
black of widowhood, the other was dressed in
bridal white, and they were both alike awful in
their mockery of guiltless sorrow and guiltless
joy. They were not old, but the soul of youth
was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and
ruin ancient as sin looked from their eyes ;
their talk and laughter seemed the echo of an
innumerable multitude of the lost haunting the
world in every land and time, each solitary for-
ever, yet all bound together in the unity of an
imperishable slavery and shame.

What a stale effect ! What hackneyed char-
acters ! 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

The Night Boat 87

book in the remote epoch of which I write, and
a very fashionable book indeed. There was in
the air that odor of paint and carpet which pre-
vails on steamboats ; the glass drops of the chan-
deliers ticked softly against each other, as the
vessel shook with her respiration, like a comfort-
able sleeper, and imparted a delicious feeling of
cosiness and security to our travelers.

A few hours later they struggled awake at
the sharp sound of the pilot's bell signaling the
engineer to slow the boat. There was a mo-
ment of perfect silence ; then all the drops of
the chandeliers in the saloon clashed musically
together ; then fell another silence ; and at last
came wild cries for help, strongly qualified with
blasphemies and curses. " Send out a boat ! "
" There was a woman aboard that steamboat ! "
" Lower your boats ! " " Run a craft right
down, with your big boat ! " " Send out a boat
and pick up the crew ! " The cries rose and
sank, and finally ceased; through the lattice
of the stateroom window some lights shone
faintly on the water at a distance.

"Wait here, Isabel!" said her husband.
" We 've run down a boat. We don't seem
hurt ; but I '11 go see. I '11 be back in a
minute."

Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille,
a world wildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it

88 Their Wedding Journey

was the fashion for ladies to wear their hair
down their backs, and to walk about in their
stockings, and to speak to each other without
introduction. The place with which she had
felt so familiar a little while before was now
utterly estranged. There was no motion of the
boat, and in the momentary suspense a quiet
prevailed, in which those grotesque shapes
of disarray crept noiselessly round whispering
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 all gone like Basil to learn the extent
of the calamity. A mist of sleep involved the
whole, and it was such a topsy-turvy world that
it would have seemed only another 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 fright that made all others
friends, and, for aught that most knew, in the
presence of death itself, these two moved to-
gether shunned and friendless.

Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had
become known to Isabel and the rest that their
own steamer had suffered no harm, but that she
had struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla
of canal-boats, from which those alarming cries
and curses had come. The steamer was now

His Midnight Vigil.

The Night Boat 91

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
chandeliers," 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 an-
swered lightly, " I don't think you ladies ought
to have been disturbed at all. In running over
a common tow-boat on a perfectly clear night
like this there should have been no noise and
no perceptible jar. They manage better on
the Mississippi, and both boats often go down
without waking the lightest sleeper on board."

The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of
humor, listened with undisguised displeasure to
this speech. It dispersed them, in fact ; some
turned away to bivouac for the rest of the night
upon the armchairs and sofas, while others
returned to their rooms. With the latter went
Isabel. " Lock me in, Basil," she said, with a
bold meekness, "and if anything more happens
don't wake me till the last moment." It was
hard to part from him, but she felt that his
vigil would somehow be useful to the boat, and
she confidingly fell into a sleep that lasted till
daylight.

Meantime, her husband, on whom she had
tacitly devolved so great a responsibility, went

92 Their Wedding Journey

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 col-
loquy. 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 sensible frame of mind is
unsympathetic, and, if expressed, unpopular, or
perhaps not quite safe ; and Basil, warned by
his fate with the ladies, listened gravely to the
voice of the common imbecility and incoherence.

The principal speaker was a tall person, wear-
ing a silk traveling-cap. He had a face of
stupid 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 '11 be the most important wit-
ness at the trial," he added, as if there would
ever be any trial about it. " Now, how did the
tow-boat hit us ? "

"Well, she came bows on."

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

The Night Boat

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

"Just so," continued the examiner, accepting

Discussing the A ccident

the explanation, "bows on. Now I want to
ask if you saw our captain or any of the crew
about?"

" Not a soul," said the witness, with the
solemnity of a man already on oath.

94 Their Wedding Journey

"That '11 do," exclaimed the other. "This
gentleman's experience coincides exactly with-
my own. I didn't see the collision, but I did
see the cloud of steam from the sinking boat,
and I saw her go down. There wasn't an of-
ficer to be found anywhere on board our boat.
I looked about for the captain and the mate
myself, and could n't find either of them high
or low."

"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.

The gentleman in the silk traveling-cap now
took a chair, and a number of sympathetic
listeners drew their chairs about him, and
then began an interchange of experience, in
which each related to the last particular all
that he felt, thought, and said, and, if married,
what his wife felt, thought, and said, at the
moment of the calamity. They turned the
disaster over and over in their talk, and rolled
it under their tongues. Then they reverted to
former accidents in which they had been 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

The Night Boat 95

just see, gentlemen, what a little thing, humanly
speaking, life depends upon. If that old woman
had been able to sleep, and hadn't sent that
boy down to warn the train, we should have
run into the rock and been dashed to pieces.
The passengers 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 in-
terest, as one who 'had invented a safe method
of travel.

" I happened to be up to-night, but I almost
always undress and go to bed, just as if I were
in my own house," said the gentleman of the
silk cap. I don't say your way is n't the best,
but that's my way."

The champions of the rival systems debated
their merits with suavity and mutual respect,
but they met with scornful silence a compro-
mising 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

96 Their Wedding Journey

keenly here and there, veiled the heavens ; shad-
owy bluffs loomed up on either hand ; in a hollow
on the left twinkled a drowsy little town ; a
.beautiful stillness lay on all.

After an hour's interval a shout was heard
from far down the river ; then later the plash
of oars ; then a cry hailing the approaching
boats, and the answer, " All safe ! " Presently
the boats had come alongside, and the passen-
gers 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
anguish.

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

The boat swiftly ascended the current, and
presently the steeper shores were left behind,
and the banks fell away in long upward sloping
fields, with farmhouses and with stacks of
harvest dimly visible in the generous expanses.
By and by they passed a fisherman drawing
his nets, and bending from his boat, there near
Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque immortal
attitudes of Raphael's Galilean fisherman ; and

The Night Boat

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

ff.MT.
Watching for the Morning

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,

98 Their Wedding Journey

as the calamitous always seem to the happy,
and Basil's pity was quite an abstraction ; which,
again, amused and shocked him, and he asked
his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little
more earnestly as the lot of all men, and not
merely of an alien creature here and there.
He dutifully tried to imagine another issue
to the disaster of the night, and to realize
himself suddenly bereft of her who so filled
his life. He bade his soul remember that, in
the security of sleep, Death had passed them
both so close that his presence might well
have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg that
grazes the ship in the night freezes all the
air about it. But it was quite idle : where love
was, life only was ; and sense and spirit alike
put aside the burden that he would have laid
upon them ; his reverie reflected with delicious
caprice the looks, the tones, the movements that
he loved, and bore, him far away from the sad
images that he had invited to mirror them-
selves in it.

A DAY'S RAILROADING

HAPPINESS has commonly a good appetite ;
and the thought of the fortunately ended ad-
ventures ol the night, the fresh morning air,
and the content of their own hearts, gifted our
friends, by the time the boat reached Albany,
with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated
with spirit the question of breakfast and the
best place of breakfasting in a city which
neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive
and sketchy way.

They decided at last, in view of the early
departure of the train, and the probability that
they would be more hurried at a hotel, to break-
fast at the station, and thither they went and
took places at one of the many tables within,
where they seemed to have been expected
only by the flies. The waitress plainly had
not looked for threm, and for a time found their
presence so incredible that she would not ac-
knowledge 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

ioo Their Wedding Journey

not send them, till they were quite faint, the
peppery and muddy draught which impudently
affected to be coffee, the oily slices of fugacious
potatoes slipping about in their shallow dish
and skillfully evading pursuit, the pieces of beef
that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit,
steaming evilly up into the face when opened,
and then soddening into masses of condensed
dyspepsia.

The wedding-] ourneyers looked at each other
with eyes of sad amaze. They bowed them-
selves for a moment to the viands, and then by
an equal impulse refrained. They were suffi-
ciently young, they were happy, they were hun-
gry; nature is great and strong, but art is
greater, and before these triumphs of the cook
at the Albany depot appetite succumbed. By a
terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce
and turbid liquor in their cups, and then specu-
lated fantastically upon the character and his-
tory of the materials of that breakfast.

Presently Isabel paused, played a little with
her knife, and, after a moment, looked up at
her husband with an arch regard and said : " I
was just thinking of a small station somewhere
in the south of France where our train once
stopped for breakfast. I remember the fresh-
ness and brightness of everything on the little
tables, — the plates, the napkins, the gleaming

A Days Railroading 101

half-bottles of wine. They seemed to have
been preparing that breakfast for us from the
beginning of time, and we were hardly seated
before they served us with great cups of cafe-
an-lait, and the sweetest rolls and butter ; then
a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and
potatoes, — such potatoes ! Dear me, how little
I ate of it ! I wish, for once, I 'd had your ap-
petite, Basil; I do indeed."

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which,
despite the tragical contrast her words had
suggested, Basil finally joined. So much amaze-
ment had probably never been got before out
of the misery inflicted in that place ; but their
lightness did not at all commend them. The
waitress had not liked it from the first, and
had served them with reluctance ; and the pro-
prietor 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 traveling, — that people
who serve the public are kindly and pleasant in
proportion as they serve it well. The unjust
and the inefficient have always that conscious-
ness of evil which will not let a man forgive his
victim, or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves
over the fact. There was already such heat
from without, even at eight o'clock in the morn-

102 Their Wedding Journey

ing, that they chose to be as cool as possible in
mind, and they placidly took their places in the
train, which had been made up for departure.
They had deliberately rejected the notion of a
drawing-room car as affording a less varied
prospect of humanity, and as being less in the
spirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in
reward, they found themselves quite comfort-
able in the common passenger-car, and disposed
to view the scenery, into which they struck an
hour after leaving the city, with much compla-
cency. There was sufficient draught through
the open window to make the heat tolerable,
and the great brooding warmth gave to the
landscape the charm which it alone can impart.
It is a landscape that I greatly love for its mild
beauty and tranquil picturesqueness, and it is
in honor of our friends that I say they enjoyed
it. There are nowhere any considerable hills,
but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant
hollows and the wide meadows of a grazing
country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River
rippling down through all, and at frequent inter-
vals the life of the canal, now near, now far
away, with the lazy boats that seem not to stir,
and the horses that the train passes with a
whirl, and leaves slowly stepping forward and
swiftly slipping backward. There are farms
that had once, or still have, the romance to

A Days Railroading

103

A Glimpse of the Canal

them of being Dutch
farms, — if there is any
romance in that, — and
one conjectures a Dutch
thrift in their waving
grass and grain. Spaces
of woodland here and
there dapple the slopes,
and the cosy red farm-
houses repose by the side
of their capacious red
barns. Truly, there is
no ground on which to
defend the idleness, and yet as the train strives
furiously onward amid these scenes of fertility
and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind
it, and to saunter at will up and down the land-
scape. 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
leisure to be knitting or sewing ; or, if there
are no old ladies, with decent caps upon their
gray hair, then I do not complain if the drink
is brought me by some red - cheeked, comely
young girl, out of Washington Irving's pages,
with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors
my diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty
awkwardness while she waits till I have done

104 Their Wedding Journey

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 excur-
sions 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 people 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 spray hanging over it. I walk
unmolested through the farmer's tall grass, and
ride with him upon the perilous seat of his volu-
ble 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 say is not
true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hay-
field, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal
beside that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones
you cannot count only because they are so
many. He never wakes up, but, with a falter-
ing 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

A Days Railroading 105

boat up to the path, so that I can step on. She
is laden with flour from the valley of the Gene-
see, 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 fur-
nished 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 imperceptibly down the canal,
un vexed by the far-off future of arrival.

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental
pastimes, but I am aware that less superficial
spirits could not be satisfied with them,, and I
do not pretend that my wedding- journeyers
were so. They cast an absurd poetry over the
landscape; they invited themselves to be re-
minded of passages of European travel by it ;
and they placed villas and castles and palaces
upon all the eligible building-sites. Ashamed
of these devices, presently, Basil patriotically
tried to reconstruct the Dutch and Indian past
of the Mohawk Valley, but here he was foiled
by the immense ignorance of his wife, who, as
a true American woman, knew nothing of the
history of her own country, and less than
nothing of the barbarous regions beyond the
borders of her native province. She proved a

io6 TJieir Wedding Journey

bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the
events which Basil mentioned ; and she had never
even heard of the massacres by the French and
Indians at Schenectady, which he in his boy-
hood 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 toma-
hawk 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 sincere observer of man will not .desire to
look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but
will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy
and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at
such times very precious ; and I never perceive
him to be so much a man and a brother as when
I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected
dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently
into his life and inhabit there, to think his shal-
low and feeble thoughts, to be moved by his
dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by
his stinted inspirations, to share his foolish pre-

A Days Railroading

107

judices, to practice his obtuse selfishness. Yes,
it is a very amusing world, if you do not refuse
to be amused ; and our friends were very willing
to be entertained.
They delighted in
the precise, 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
travelers, leaping
in thought with the
boys from the mov-
ing train, felt that
they did so at the
peril of their lives.
Then they were in-
terested in people
who went out and found their friends waiting
for them, or else did not find them, and wandered
disconsolately up and down before the country
stations, carpet-bag in hand ; in women who came
aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands with
or sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got
seats for them, and placed their bags or their

A Hurried Good-by

io8 Their Wedding Journey

babies in their laps, and turned for a nod at the
door ; in young ladies who were seen to places
by young men (the latter seemed not to care if
the train did go off with them), and then threw
up their windows and talked with girl-friends on
the platform without till the train began to move,
and at last turned with gleaming eyes and moist
red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of
thinking about it, and could not calm themselves
to the dull level of the travel around them ; in
the conductor, coldly and inaccessibly vigilant,
as he went his rounds, reaching blindly for the
tickets with one hand while he bent his head
from time to time, and listened with a faint, sar-
castic smile to the questions of passengers who
supposed they were going to get some informa-
tion 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 impartiality, or a prodigious ignorance, or
a supernatural perception of character in those
who received them.

A through train from East to West presents
some peculiar features as well as the traits com-
mon to all railway travel ; and our friends de-
cided that this was not a very well-dressed com-
pany, and would contrast with the people on
an express train between Boston and New York

A Days Railroading

109

to no better advantage than these would show
beside the average passengers between London
and Paris. And it seems true that on a west-
ering line the blacking fades gradually from
the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the coat
loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person
lounges into increasing informality of costume.
I speak of the undressf ul sex alone : woman,
wherever she is, appears in the last attainable
effects of fashion, which are
now all but telegraphic and uni-
versal. But most of the passen-
gers here were men, and they
were plainly of the free-and-
easy West rather than the dap-
per East. They wore faces
thoughtful with the problem of
buying cheap and selling dear,
and they could be known by
their silence from the loqua-
cious, acquaintance - making
way-travelers. In these, the
mere coming aboard seemed to beget an ag-
gressively confidential mood. Perhaps they
clutched recklessly at any means of relieving
their ennui; or they felt that they might here
indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography,
so dear to all of us ; or else, in view of the many
possible catastrophes, they desired to leave

The Softening Hat

Their Wedding Journey

some little memory of themselves behind. At
any rate, whenever the train stopped, the wed-
ding-jo urn eyers caught fragments of the per-
sonal 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 some-
what magnify themselves, and
put the best complexion on
their actions and the worst
upon their sufferings ; that they
should all appear the luckiest
or the unluckiest, the healthiest
or the sickest, people that ever
were, and should all have made
or lost the most money. There
was a prevailing desire among
them to make out that they
came from or were going to some very large
place ; and our friends fancied an actual morti-
fication in the face of a modest gentleman who
got out at Penelope (or some other insignificant
classical station, in the ancient Greek and
Roman part of New York State), after having
listened to the life of a somewhat rustic-looking
person who had described himself as belonging
near New York City.

Basil also found diversion in the tender
couples, who publicly comported themselves as

In the Fashion

A Days Railroading

Buying ckeaj.

if in a sylvan solitude, and, as it had been on the
bank of some umbrageous stream, far from the
ken of envious or unsympa-
thetic eyes, reclined upon each
other's shoulders and slept ;
but Isabel declared that this
behavior was perfectly inde-
cent. She granted, of course,
that they were foolish, inno-
cent 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 out-
rageous, it was scandalous,
it was really infamous.
Before she would allow her-
self to do such a thing, she
would — well, she hardly
knew what she would not
do ; she would have a divorce, at any rate. She
wondered that Basil could laugh at it ; and he
would make her hate him if he kept on.

Selling dear

112

Their Wedding Journey

From the seat behind their own they were
now made listeners to the history of a ten

weeks' typhoid fever,
from the moment
when the narrator no-
ticed that he had not
felt very well for a
day or two back, and
all at once a kind of
shiver took him, till
he lay fourteen days
perfectly insensible,
and could eat nothing
but a little pounded
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 history, from which not
the smallest particular or the least significant
symptom of the case was omitted, occupied an
hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for
the entertainment of one who had been five
minutes before it began a stranger to the histo-
rian.

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel
wailed forth in accents of desperation the words,

Scraping A cquaintance

A Days Railroading'

" Oh, disgusting ! " The monotony of the narra-
tive 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, by the harshest construction, in the least
to blame, she was silent.

"Never mind, dear, never mind," he coaxed,
"you were really not responsible. It was
fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune, — what-
ever you like. In the case of the others, whom
you despise so justly,
I dare say it is sheer
disgraceful affection.
But see that ravishing
placard, swinging from
the roof : ( This train
stops twenty minutes
for dinner at Utica.'
In a few minutes more
we shall be at Utica,
If they have anything
edible there, it shall 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

Imaginary Solitude

Their Wedding Journey

" Oh, disgusting I "

which it seemed to them France, in the flush of
her' prosperity, need not have blushed to serve ;
for if it wanted a little in the last graces of art,
it redeemed itself in abundance, variety, and
wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famish-
ing passenger stood a beneficent coal-black

A Days Railroading 115

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 disen-
thrall it of servility, and constitute him your
eager host, not your menial, for the moment.
From table to table passed a calming influence
in the person of the proprietor, who, as he took
his richly earned money, checked the rising
fears of the guests by repeated proclamations
that there was plenty of time, and that he
would give them due warning before the train
started. Those who had flocked out of the cars,
to prey with beak and claw, as the vulture-like
fashion is, upon everything 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 din-
ner in spite of himself.

"O Basil, Basil," cried Isabel, when the train
was again in motion, " have we really dined
once more? It seems too good to be true.
Cleanliness, plenty, wholesomeness, civility !
Yes, as you say, they cannot be civil where
they are not just ; honesty and courtesy go
together; and wherever they give you outra-
geous things to eat, they add indigestible in-
sult. Basil, dear, don't be jealous. I shall never

n6 Their Wedding Journey

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 affection-
ate politeness. He made me feel that every
mouthful I ate was a personal favor to him.
What a complete gentleman ! There ought
never to be a white waiter. None but negroes
are able to render their service a pleasure and
distinction to 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 ser-
vice of it. But here they erred in the right
direction, and I find nothing more admirable
in their behavior throughout a wedding journey
which certainly had its trials, than their willing-
ness to make the very best of whatever would
suffer itself to be made anything at all of.
They celebrated its pleasures with magnanimous
excess, they passed over its griefs with a wise
forbearance. That which they found the most
difficult of management was the want of inci-
dent for the most part of the time ; and I who
write their history might also sink under it, but
that I am supported by the fact that it is so
typical in this respect. I even imagine that
ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning
over these barren details with the lifelike weari-
ness of an actual traveling companion of theirs.

A Day s Railroading 117

Their own silence often sufficed my wedded
lovers, or then, when there was absolutely no-
thing to engage them, they fell back upon the
story of their love, which they were never tired
of hearing as they severally knew it. Let it
not be a reproach to human nature or to me if
I say that there was something in the comfort
of having well dined which now touched the
springs of sentiment with magical effect, and
that they had never so rejoiced in these tender
reminiscences.

They had planned to stop over at Rochester
till the morrow, that they might arrive at
Niagara by daylight, and at Utica they had
suddenly resolved to make the rest of the day's
journey in a 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 traveling 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 land-
scape without. They said that none but Amer-
icans or enchanted princes in the Arabian

n8 Their Wedding Journey

Nights ever traveled in such state ; and when
the stewards of the car came round successively
with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret
punches, they felt a heightened assurance that
they were either enchanted princes — or Amer-
icans. There were more ladies and more fash-
ion than in the other cars ; and prettily dressed
children played about on the carpet ; but the
general appearance of the passengers hardly
suggested greater wealth than elsewhere ; and
they were plainly in that car because they were
of the American race, which finds nothing too
good for it that its money can buy.

THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND

THEY knew none of the hotels in Rochester,
arid they had chosen a certain one in reliance
upon their handbook. When they named it,
there stepped forth a porter of an incredibly
cordial and pleasant countenance, who took their
traveling-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 des-
canted 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 re-
ward for his comment upon it. He cast quite
a glamour over Rochester, so that in passing a
body of water, bordered by houses, and over-
looked by odd balconies and galleries, and
crossed in the distance by a bridge upon which
other houses were built, they boldly declared,
being at their wit's end for a comparison, and
taken with the unhoped - for picturesqueness,

120

Their Wedding Journey

that it put them in mind of Verona. Thus they
reached their hotel in almost a spirit of foreign
travel, and very willing to verify the pleasant
porter's assurance that they would like it, for
everybody liked it ; and it was with a sudden

sinking of the
heart that Basil
beheld presiding
over the 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 traveling
public breathed from his person in the mystical
odors of Ihlang-ihlang. He did not lift his
haughty head to look at the wayfarer who
meekly wrote his name in the register ; 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

L ike Verona

The Condescending Hotel Clerk

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 1 23

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, anyway, Chawley ! "

When I reflect that this was a type of the
hotel clerk throughout the United States, that
behind unnumbered registers at this moment he
is snubbing travelers into the dust, and that they
are suffering and perpetuating him, I am lost in
wonder at the national meekness. Not that I
am one to refuse the humble pie his jeweled
fingers offer me. Abjectly I take my key, and
creep off upstairs after the call-boy, and try to
give myself the genteel air of one who has not
been stepped upon. But I think homicidal
things all the same, and I rejoice that in the
safety of print I can cry out against the despot,
whom I have not the presence to defy. " You
vulgar and cruel little soul," I say, and I imagine
myself breathing the words to his teeth, " why
do you treat a weary stranger with this igno-
miny ? I am to pay well for what I get, and I
shall not complain of that. But look at me, and
own my humanity ; confess by some civil action,
by some decent phrase, that I have rights and
that they shall be respected. Answer my
proper questions ; respond to my fair demands.

124 Their Wedding Journey

Do not slide my key at me ; do not deny me the
poor politeness of a nod as you give it iri 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
afternoon ; but when his luggage had been put
in it seemed useless to protest, and like a true
American, like you, like me, he shrank from as-
serting himself. When the sun went down it
would be cool enough ; and they turned their
thoughts to supper, not venturing to hope that,
as it proved, the handsome clerk was the sole
blemish of the house.

Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evi-
dences of luxury afforded by all the appoint-
ments of a hotel so far west of Boston, and they
both began to feel that natural ease and superi-
ority which an inn always inspires in its guests,
and which our great hotels, far from impairing,
enhance in flattering degree ; in fact, the clerk
once forgotten, I protest, for my own part, I am
never more conscious of my merits and riches
in any other place. One has there the romance
of being a stranger and a mystery to every one
else, and lives in the alluring possibility of not
being found out a most ordinary person.

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 125

Evidences of Luxury so far front Boston

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 before them and drew out
chairs for them at a table, and signaled waiters

126 Their Wedding Journey

to serve them, first laying before them with a
gracious flourish the bill of fare. A force of
servants flocked about them, as if to contest the
honor of ordering their supper ; one set upon
the table a heaping vase of strawberries, another
flanked it with flagons of cream, a third accom-
panied 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 dis-
patched for steak, for broiled whitefish of the
lakes, — noblest and delicatest of the fish that
swim, — for broiled chicken, for fried potatoes,
for muffins, for whatever the lawless fancy and
ravening appetites of the wayfarers could sug-
gest, this fifth waiter remained to tempt them
to further excess, and vainly proposed some
kind of eggs, — fried eggs, poached eggs,
scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, or omelette.

" Oh, you 're sure, dearest, that this is n't a
vision of fairy-land, which will vanish presently,
and leave us empty and forlorn ? " plaintively
murmured Isabel, as the menial train reap-
peared, 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 dorit think, Basil," she faltered,

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 127

" that they could have found out we 're a bridal
party, and that they 're serving us so magnifi-
cently because — because — Oh, I shall be
miserable every moment we 're here ! " she con-
cluded desperately.

She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for

A Swarm of Servants

a woman with so much broiled whitefish on
her plate, and such a banquet array about her ;
and her husband made haste to reassure her.

128 Their Wedding Journey

" You 're still demoralized, Isabel, by our suffer
ings 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 discov-
ered by the register that we are from Boston,
and we are merely meeting the reverence, affec-
tion, and homage which the name everywhere
commands. It 's our fortune to represent for
the time being the intellectual and moral virtue
of Boston. This supper is not a tribute to you
as a bride, but as a Bostonian."

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 forgot her fears ; she returned with
renewed appetite to the supper, and in its excel-
lence 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,

The Beacon Street of Rochester

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 131

he did not retire 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 existence of much finer things at the
East — " for a small hotel ? "

They imagined this waiter as new to his sta-
tion in life, as perhaps just risen to it from
some country tavern, and unable to repress his
exultation in what seemed their sympathetic
presence. They were charmed to have invited
his guileless confidence, to have evoked possi-
bly all the simple poetry of his soul ; it was
what might have happened in Italy, only there
so much naivete would have meant money ;
they looked at each other with rapture, and
Basil answered warmly, while the waiter flushed
as at a personal compliment : " Yes, it 's a nice
hotel ; 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."

i32 Their Wedding Journey

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 of the houses had gardened spaces about
them, from which stole, like breaths of sweetest
and saddest regret, the perfume of midsummer
flowers, — the despair of the rose for the bud.
As they passed a certain house, a song fluttered
'out of the open window and ceased, the piano
warbled at the final rush of fingers over its
chords, and they saw her with her fingers rest-
ing lightly on the keys, and her graceful head
lifted to look into his ; they saw him with his
arm yet stretched across to the leaves of music
he had been turning, and his face lowered to
meet her gaze.

" Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there ! "
" And if they knew that we, on our wedding
journey, stood outside, would not they wish it
was they, here ? "

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 133

" 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 wan-
dered on, " and
all strange cities
are enchanted.
What is Roches-
ter to the Roches-
terese? A place
of a hundred thou-
sand people, as we
read in our guide,
an immense flour
interest, a great
railroad entrepot,
an unrivaled nur-
sery trade, a uni-
versity, two com-
mercial colleges,
three collegiate
institutes, eight
or ten newspapers,

and a free library. I dare say any respectable
resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over
his city. But Rochester is for us, who don't

/ "wish it was ive

134 Their Wedding journey

know it at all, a city of any time or country,
moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over piano-
fortes, of a palatial hotel with pastoral waiters
and 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."

" And who in the world was Sam Patch ? "

"Isabel, your ignorance of all that an Amer-
ican woman should be proud of distresses me.
Have you really, then, never heard of the man
who invented the saying, ' Some things can be
done as well as others/ and proved it by jump-
ing over Niagara Falls twice ? Spurred on by
this belief, he attempted the leap of the Genesee
Falls. The leap was easy enough, but the com-
ing 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 Rochester ? Upon my word, I 'm ashamed,
Why, we're within ten minutes' walk of them
now."

" Then walk to them at once ! " cried Isabel,

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 135

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 had n't happened to think of Sam
Patch."

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a
chief object of their journey had been to visit
the scene of Sam Patch's fatal exploit, and she
drew Basil with a nervous swiftness in the
direction of the railroad station, beyond which
he said were the falls. Presently, after thread-
ing 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 loco-
motives, they found, by dint of much asking, a
street winding up the hillside to the left, and
leading to the German Bierhaus that gives ac-
cess to the best view of the cataract.

The Americans have characteristically bor-
dered the river with manufactures, making
every drop work its passage to the brink ; while
the Germans have as characteristically made use
of the beauty left over, and have built a Bier-
haus where they may regale both soul and
sense in the presence of the cataract. Our

136 Their Wedding Journey

travelers might, in another mood and place,
have thought it droll to arrive at that sublime
spectacle through a Bierhaus, but in this en-
chanted city it seemed to have a peculiar fit-
ness.

A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival
space occupied by many tables, each of which
was surrounded by a gfoup of clamorous Ger-
mans of either sex and every age, with tall
beakers of beaded lager before them, and slim
flasks of Rhenish ; overhead flamed the gas
in globes of varicolored glass ; the walls were
painted like those of such haunts in the father-
land ; 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.
Aniidst the inspiriting clash of plates and glasses,
the rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse
rush of gutturals, they could catch the words
Franzosen, Kaiser, Konig, and Schlacht, and
they knew that festive company to be exulting
in the first German triumphs of the war, which
were then the day's news ; they saw fists shaken
at noses in fierce exchange of joy, arms tossed
abroad in wild congratulation, and health-pour-
ing goblets of beer lifted in air. Then they
stepped into the moonlight again, and heard

The Genesee Falls

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 139

only the solemn organ stops of the cataract.
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 defmiteness was to be desired in the specta-
cle, but there was ample compensation in the
mystery with which the broad effulgence and
the dense unluminous shadows of the moon-
shine invested it. The light touched all the
tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe away
from the brink of the cataract, and then desper-
ately breaking and perishing to fall, the white
disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bot-
tom of the vast and deep ravine through which
the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed
to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a
wall of snowy compactness, now to disperse
into their multitudinous particles and hang like
some vaporous cloud from the cliff. Every
moment renewed the vision of beauty in some
rare and fantastic shape ; and its loveliness iso-
lated 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.

i4° Their Wedding Journey

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 think-
ing, and it was immortalized in support of a
great idea, — the feasibility of all things ; while
Leander's has come down to us as that of the
weak victim of a passion. We shall never have
a poetry of our own till we get over this ab-
surd reluctance ,from facts, till we make the
ideal embrace and include the real, till we
consent to face the music in our simple com-
mon names, and put Smith into a lyric and
Jones into a tragedy. The Germans are braver
than we, and in them you find facts and dreams
continually blended and confronted. Here is a
fortunate illustration. The people we met com-
ing out of this pavilion were lovers, and they
had been here sentimentalizing on this superb
cataract, as you call it, with which my heroic
Patch is not worthy to be named. No doubt
they had been quoting Uhland or some other
of their romantic poets, perhaps singing some
of their tender German love-songs, — the ten-

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 141

derest, unearthliest love-songs in the world.
At the same time they did not disdain the
matter-of-fact coporeity in which their senti-
ment was enshrined ; they fed it heartily and
abundantly with the banquet whose 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 brim-
ming them ; some shreds 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 sup-
pose they scorned the idea of Sam Patch as
they gazed upon the falls ? On the contrary,
I Ve no doubt that he recalled to her the bal-
lad 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.

" ' In the Bierhausgarten I linger
By the Falls of the Genesee :
From the Table-Rock in the middle
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.

142 Their Wedding Journey.

" ' 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.'

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

11 1 don't see that he got in the name of Sam
Patch, after all," said Isabel.

" Oh 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, ' 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-journeyers
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

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 143

which they got had come the past night from
Albany, and had an air of almost conscious shab-
biness, 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 Roch-
ester 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 black-
est of the arts, making time. The long irregu-
lar 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 hor-
ror was not painted were dull and damp with
apathetic misery.

The incidents were in harmony with the ab-
ject 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

144 Their Wedding Journey.

jar, on the other side, about a seat which the
Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept
filled with packages on the pretense that it was
engaged. It was a loud and fierce quarrel
enough, but it won no sort of favor ; and when
the Jewess had given a final opinion that the
greedy old woman was no lady, and the boy,
who disputed in an ironical temper, replied,
" Highly complimentary, I must say," there was
no sign of relief or other acknowledgment in
any of the spectators, that there had been a
quarrel.

There was a little more interest taken in the
misfortune of an old purblind German and his
son, who were found by the conductor to be a
few hundred miles out of the direct course to
their destination, and were with some trouble
and the aid of an Americanized fellow-country-
man 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 rounds, bestrew-
ing 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 American people, oddly mani-
fested in a situation where he could otherwise
have had little proof of their care. He opened

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 145

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 re-
peated, " Ten cents !
ten cents ! " with tire-
some patience, while
the other passengers
smiled. When it had
passed through the
alien's head that he was
to pay for this national
gift and he took with
his tremulous fingers
from the recesses of his
pocket-book a ten-cent
note and handed it to
his tormentor, some of
the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and
Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other
with eyes of mutual reproach.

"Well, upon my word, my dear," he said, "I
think we 've fallen pretty low. I 've never felt
such a poor, shaboy ruffian before. Good hea-
vens ! 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 imbe-
ciles we are ! Whom have I married ? A
woman with neither heart nor brain ! "

The Unsparing Train-Boy.

146 Their Wedding Journey

" Oh, 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 ! Oh, it 's the terrible
weather ; the despotism of the dust and heat ;
the wickedness of the infernal air. What a
squalid and loathsome company ! "

At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they
found themselves with several hours' time on
their hands before the train started for Niagara,
and in the first moments of tedium, Isabel for-
got herself into saying, " Don't you think we 'd
have done better to go directly from Rochester
to the Falls, instead of coming this way ? "

" Why certainly. I did n't propose coming
this way."

" I know it, dear. I was only asking," said
Isabel meekly. " But I should think you 'd
have generosity enough to take a little of the
blame, when I wanted to come out of a roman-
tic feeling for you."

The Enchanted City, and Beyond 147

This romantic feeling Deferred 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 retro-
spectively with his past, was resolved 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 Bos-
ton," she said, "we will not live at Rochester,
as I thought last night ; we '11 come to Buffalo."
She found that the place had all the pictur-
esqueness of a seaport, without the ugliness
that attends the rising and falling tides. A
delicious freshness breathed from the lake,
which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at
last, with no line between sharper than that
which divides drowsing from dreaming. But
the color was the most charming thing, that
delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of
the sea-blue, but infinitely softer and lovelier.
The nearer expanses rippled with dainty waves,
silver and lucent ; the further levels made, with

148 Their Wedding Journey

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 con-
sented to glimpses of the river which carries
the waters of the lake for their mighty plunge,
and which shows itself very nobly from time to
time as you draw toward the cataract, with
wooded or cultivated islands, and rich farms
along its low shores, and at last flashes upon
the eye the shining white of the rapids, — a
hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness to
be revealed.

NIAGARA

As the train stopped, Isabel's heart beat with
a childlike exultation, as I believe every one's
heart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara.
She had been trying to fancy, from time to
time, that she heard the roar of the cataract,
and now, when she alighted from the car, she
was sure she should have heard it but for the
vulgar little noises that attend the arrival of
trains at Niagara as weir as everywhere else.
" Never mind, dearest ; you shall be stunned
with it before you leave," promised her hus-
band ; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode
through the quaint streets of the village, where
it remains a question whether the lowliness of
the shops and private 'houses makes the hotels
look so vast, or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs
all the other buildings. The immense caravan-
saries 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 con-

Their Wedding Journey

scions of their disproportion to the accommo-
dations of the smallest. They were the sole
occupants of the omnibus, and they were embar-
rassed to be received at their hotel with a burst
of minstrelsy from a whole band of music.
Isabel felt that a single stringed instrument of
some timid note would have been enough ; and

Basil was going to ex-
press 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 per-
ceived that another
omnibus had turned
the corner and was
drawing up to the pil-
lared portico of the
hotel. A small fam-
ily dismounted, and
the feet of the last
had hardly touched

the pavement when the music again ended as
abruptly as those flourishes of trumpets that
usher player-kings upon the stage. Isabel could

The Arrival

Niagara 151

not help laughing at this melodious parsimony.
k! 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 looking at the
Falls or confined to their rooms. However, our
travelers took in the almost weird emptiness of
the place with their usual gratitude to fortune
for all queerness in life, and followed to the
pleasant quarters assigned them. There was
time before supper for a glance at the cataract,
and after a brief toilet they sallied out again
upon the holiday street, with its parade of gay
little shops, and thence passed into the grove
beside the Falls, enjoying at every instant their
feeling of arrival at a sublime destination.

In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank
with Rome, the metropolis of history and reli-
gion ; with Venice, the chief city of sentiment
and fantasy. In either you are at once made at
home by a perception of its greatness, in which
there is no quality of aggression, as there always
seems to be in minor places as well as in minor
men, and you gratefully accept its sublimity as a
fact in no way contrasting with your own insig-
nificance.

Our friends were beset of course by many

152 Their Wedding Jotirney

carriage-drivers, whom they repelled with the
kindly firmness of experienced travel. Isabel
even felt a compassion for these poor fellows
who had seen Niagara so much as to have for-
gotten that the first time one must see it alone
or only with the next of friendship. She was
voluble in her pity of Basil that it was not as
new to him as to her, till between the trees they
saw a white cloud of spray, shot through and
through with sunset, rising, rising, and she felt
her voice softly and steadily beaten down by
the diapason of the cataract.

I am not sure but the first emotion on view-
ing 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 results in part from lifelong
acquaintance with every variety of futile picture
of the scene. You have its outward form clearly
in your memory ; the shores, the rapids, the
islands, the curve of the Falls, and the stout
rainbow with one end resting on their top and
the other lost in the mists that rise from the
gulf beneath. On the whole, I do not account

Niagara 153

this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The sur-
prise is none the less a surprise because it is
kept till the last, and the marvel, making itself
finally felt in every nerve, and riot at once
through a single sense, all the more fully pos-
sesses you. It is as if Niagara reserved her
magnificence, and preferred to win your heart
with her beauty ; and so Isabel, who was
instinctively prepared for the reverse, suffered
a vague disappointment, for a little instant, as
she looked along the verge from the water that
caressed the shore at her feet before it flung
itself down, to the wooded point that divides
the American from the Canadian Fall, beyond
which showed dimly through its veil of golden
and silver mists the emerald wall of the great
Horse-Shoe. " How still it is ! " she said, amidst
the roar that shook the ground under their feet
and made the leaves tremble overhead, and
" How lonesome ! " amidst the people lounging
and sauntering about in every direction among
the trees. In fact, that prodigious presence
does make a solitude and silence round every
spirit worthy to perceive it, and it gives a kind
of dignity to all its belongings, so that the rocks
and pebbles in the water's edge, and the weeds
and grasses that nod above it, have a value far
beyond that of such common things elsewhere.
In all the aspects of Niagara there seems a

154 Their Wedding Journey

grave simplicity, which is perhaps a reflection
of the spectator's soul for once utterly dis-
mantled of affectation 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 struggled for handkerchiefs and fans, and
here and there put their arms about each other's
waists, and made a show of laughing and joking.
They were a picnic party of rude, silly folks of
the neighborhood, and she stood pondering them
in sad wonder if anything could be worse, when
she heard a voice saying to Basil, "Take you
next, sir ? Plenty of light yet, and the wind 's
down the river, so the spray won't interfere.
Make a capital picture of you ; falls in the back-
ground." It was the local photographer urging
them to succeed the young couple he had just
posed at the brink : the gentleman was sitting
down, with his legs crossed and his hands ele-
gantly 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-

At the Foot of the Falls

Niagara 157

ing as usual to his sympathy for perception of
her train of thought, " Well, I '11 never try to be
high-strung again. But should n't you have
thought, dearest, that I might expect to be high-
strung with success at Niagara, if anywhere ? "
She passively followed him into the long, queer,
downward-sloping edifice on the border of the
grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood
ready, and descended the incline. Emerging
into the light again, she found herself at the
foot of the fall by whose top she had just stood.
At first she was glad there were other people
down there, as if she and Basil were not enough
to bear it alone, and she could almost have
spoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with
parasols and impertinent little boots, whom their
attendant husbands were helping over the sharp
and slippery rocks so bare beyond the spray,
so green and mossy within the fall of mist.
But in another breath she forgot them, as she
looked on that dizzied sea, hurling itself from
the high summit in huge white knots, and breaks
and masses, and plunging into the gulf beside
her, while it sent continually up a strong voice
of lamentation, and crawled away in vast eddies,
with somehow a look of human terror, bewilder-
ment, 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

158 Their Wedding Journey

of the Falls almost as far as the Canada side.
They remembered afterwards how they were
able to make use of but one sense at a time, and
how when they strove to take in the forms of
the descending flood, they ceased to hear it ;
but as soon as they released their eyes from
this service, every fibre in them vibrated to the
sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it.
They were aware, too, of a strange capricious-
ness in their senses, and of a tendency of each
to palter with the things perceived. The eye
could no longer take truthful note of quality,
and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic
wall of 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 together ; and again they could
not discern if this course were from above or
from beneath, whether the water rose from the
abyss or dropped from the height. The ear
could give the brain no assurance of the sound
that filled it, and whether it were great or little ;
the prevailing softness of the cataract's tone
seemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious
force or of prodigious volume. It was only
when the sight, so idle in its own behalf, came
to the aid of the other sense, and showed them
the mute movement of each other's lips, that
they dimly appreciated the depth of sound that
involved them.

Niagara 1 59

" I think you 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 they have in late years woven a web of
wire high in air and hung a bridge from preci-
pice to precipice. Of all the bridges made with
hands it seems -the lightest, most ethereal ; it
is ideally graceful, and droops from its slight
towers like a garland. It is worthy to com-
mand, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara,
and to show the traveler the vast spectacle,
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 dark-
ness of the wooded islands, the mystery of the
vaporous gulf, the indomitable wildness of the
shores, as far as the eye can reach up or down
the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by
a path that led through another of those groves
which keep the village back from the shores
of the river on the American side, and greatly
help the sight-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

160 Their Wedding Journey

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 play of the northern lights. They
were touched with the most delicate purples
and crimsons, that darkened to deep red, and
then faded from them at a second look, and
they flew upward, swiftly upward, like troops
of pale, transparent ghosts ; while a perfectly
clear radiance, better than any other for local
color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under the
bridge the river smoothly swam, the under-
currents 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 been clear green on the face of the
cataract was here more like rich verd-antique,

Niagara 161

and had a look of firmness almost like that of
the stone itself. So it showed beneath the
bridge, and down the river till the curving
shores hid it. These, springing abruptly from
the water's brink, and shagged with pine and
cedar, displayed the tender verdure of grass and
bushes intermingled with the dark evergreens
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 between their
heavily wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not
how long, in rapture on the sight ; and then,
looking back from the shore to the spot where
they had stood, they felt relieved that unreal-
ity should possess itself of all, and that the
bridge should swing there in mid-air like a
filmy web, scarce more passable than the rain-
bow that flings its arch above the mists.

1 62 Their Wedding Journey

On the portico of the hotel they found half
a score of gentlemen smoking, and creating
together that collective silence which passes
for sociality on our continent. Some carriages
stood before the door, and within, around the
base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle call-boys.

There were a few trunks heaped together in
one place, with a porter standing guard over
them ; a solitary guest was buying a cigar at
the newspaper stand in one corner ; another
friendless creature was writing a letter in the
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 bustle, 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 content in a secluded window-seat.
They were not seen by the three people who
entered soon after and halted in the centre of
the room.

" Why, Kitty ! " said one of the two ladies
who must be in any traveling-party of three,

/// the Grand Parlor

Niagara 165

"this is more inappropriate to your gorgeous
array than the supper-room, even."

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for
social conquest, in some kind of airy evening
dress, and was looking round with bewilderment
upon that forlorn waste of carpeting and up-
holstery. She owned, with a smile, that she
had not seen so much of the world yet as she
had been promised ; but she liked Niagara very
much, and perhaps they should 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 is n't prob-
able 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 mat-
ter 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 mat-
ter ? "

" Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of

1 66 Their Wedding Journey

Niagara in the most satisfactory way, it
would n't add a soul to the floating population.
Under the circumstances I prefer to leave it
unexplained."

" Do you think it 's because it 's such a hot
summer ? Do you suppose it 's not exactly the
season ? Did n't you expect there 'd be more
people ? Perhaps Niagara is n't as fashionable
as it used to be."

" It looks something like that."

"Well, what under the sun do you think is
the reason ? "

" I don't know."

"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
the most fashionable."

" I know it. I did n'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.

Niagara 167

" 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. " You know you insisted, against all
I could say or do, upon coming to this house ; I
implored you to go to the other, and now you
blame me for bringing you here."

" So I do. If you 'd let me have my own way
without opposition about coming here, I dare
say I should have gone to the other place. But
never mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I
hope. She 's your cousin."

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently
folded in her lap. She now rose and said that
she did not know 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 rea-
son."

" 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 !

1 68 Their Wedding Journey

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 to Quebec, with us ? "

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

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

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

" What a remarkable little lady ! " said Basil,
eagerly turning to Isabel for sympathy in his
enjoyment of her inconsequence.

" Yes, poor thing ! " returned his wife ; " it 's
no light matter to invite a young lady to take a
journey with you, and promise her all sorts of
gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and

Niagara 169

then find her on your hands in a desolation like
this. It's dreadful, I think."

Basil stared. " Oh, 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 in-
vite the young lady to go on with them. I won-
der her husband had the sense to think of it
first. Of course she'll have to lend her things."

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

" Peculiar ? What do you mean ? "

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

" Oh ! " said Isabel, after a moment's reflec-
tion. "That ! Did you think it so very odd ? "

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a
man must feel when he begins to perceive that
he has married the whole mystifying world of
womankind in the woman of his choice, and
made no answer. But to his own soul he said :
" I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's
acquaintance. It seems I have been flattering
myself,"

1 70 Their Wedding Journey

The next morning they went out as they had
planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after
an early breakfast. As they sauntered through
the village's contrasts of pygmy and colossal in
architecture, they praisefully took in the unal-
loyed holiday character of the place, enjoying
equally the lounging tourists at the hotel doors,
the drivers and their carriages to let, and the
little shops, with nothing but mementos of
Niagara, and Indian bead-work, and other trum-
pery, to sell. Shops so useless, they agreed,
could not be found outside the Palais Royale,
or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in
the world, but here. They felt themselves once
more a part of the tide of mere sight-seeing
pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in
other days, and in an eddy of which their love
'itself 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 during the season of bridal tours,
may be said to show richest and fairest at Niag-
ara, like the costly jewel of a precious ring.
The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal
couples, and any one out of his honeymoon is
in some degree an alien there, and must discern
a certain immodesty in his intrusion. Is it for
his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing

The Breakfast- Room Ordeal

Niagara 173

and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility
must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his
excuses to the collective rapture, take the first
train for the wicked outside world to which he
belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and
brides. Three or four, with the benediction
still on them, come down in the same car with
him ; he hands her traveling-shawl after one as
she springs from the omnibus into her hus-
band'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 man-
ners 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 ten-
der-tinted gloves, how electrical the flutter of
the snowy skirts ! What is Niagara to these
things ?

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sis-
terhood to these blessed souls ; but she secretly

174 Their Wedding Journey

rejoiced in it, even while she joined Basil in
noting their number and smiling at their inno-
cent abandon. She dropped his arm at encoun-
ter of the first couple, and walked carelessly at
his side ; she made a solemn vow never to take
hold of his watch-chain in speaking to him ; she
trusted that she might be preserved from put-
ting her face very close to his at dinner in
studying the bill of fare ; getting out of car-
riages, 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
Island, they passed a little group of the Indians
still lingering about Niagara, who make the
barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and,
like the woods and the wild faces of the cliffs
and precipices, help to keep the cataract remote,
and to invest it with the charm of primeval
loneliness. This group were women, and they
sat motionless on the ground, smiling sphinx-
like over their laps full of beadwork, and turn-
ing their dark liquid eyes of invitation upon the
passers. They wore bright kirtles, and red
shawls fell from their heads over their plump
brown cheeks and down their comfortable per-
sons. A little girl with them was attired in

Niagara 175

like gayety of color. " What is her name ? "
asked Isabel, paying for a bead pincushion.
"Daisy Smith," said her mother, in distress-
ingly good English. " But her Indian name ? "

" She has none," answered the woman, who
told Basil that her village numbered five hun-
dred 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 hat on.

" Still," said Isabel, as they turned away,
"I'm glad he hasn't Lisle-thread gloves, like
that chieftain we saw putting his forest queen
on board the train at Oneida. But how shock-
ing that they should be Christians, and Protest-
ants ! 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 surf, the dark massiveness of heavy-
climbing waves, the fleet, smooth sweep of cur-
rents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the
dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

176 Their Wedding Jojirney

Spellbound, the journeyers pored upon the
deathful course beneath their feet, gave a shud-
der to the horror of being cast upon it, and then
hurried over the bridge to the island, in the
shadow of whose wildness they sought refuge
from the sight and sound.

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 set in a corner of the path, and command-
ing 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 newspaper poet, whom the third or
fourth editor copying his verses consigned to
oblivion by carelessly clipping his name from
the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil's
memory, rather from the interest of the awful
fact it recorded, than from any merit of its
own ; and now he recalled it with a distinctness
that surprised him.

A Shady Seat on the Island

Niagara 179

AVERY.

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 't were a lost soul's cries :
Heard and could not believe ; and the morning mocked their

eyes,

Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran,
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung ?
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.

Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,
Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound,
And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon,
As it had been in some blessed trance, and now it is noon.
Hurry, now with the raft ! But oh, build it strong and stanch,
And to the lines and the treacherous rocks look well as you

launch

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 he 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.

180 Their Wedding Journey

But on a sudden thrills from the people still and pale,
Chorusing 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

wave

Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife
Struggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life, —
Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon.
Priceless second by second, so wastes the afternoon.
And it is sunset now ; and another boat and the last
Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely

passed.

IV.

Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can

stay,

Maddening against "the gate that is locked athwart his way.
" No ! we keep the bridge for them that can help him. You,
Tell us, who are you ? " " His brother ! " " God help you both !

Pass through."

Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud to him,
Unto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim ;
But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering words are lost,
As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed,
And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope
Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope ;
Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry, —
Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flying free ;
Sees, then, the form — that, spent with effort and fasting and

fear,
Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near, —

Niagara 181

Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and

hurled
Headlong on to the cataract's brink, and out of the world.

" O Basil ! " said Isabel, with a long sigh
breaking the hush that best praised the unknown
post's skill, "it z>n't true, is it ? "

" Every word, almost, even to the brother's
coming 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
overarching the falls. Its beauty is relieved
against an historical background as gloomy as
the lightest-hearted tourist could desire. The
abominable savages, revering the cataract as a
kind of august devil, and leading a life of demon-
iacal misery and wickedness, whom the first
Jesuits found here two hundred years ago ; the
ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these
squalid devil-worshipers ; 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

1 82 Their Wedding Journey

France and England ; the awful scene in the
conspiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of
English troops was driven by the Indians over
the precipice near the great Whirlpool ; the sor-
row and havoc visited upon the American settle-
ments in the Revolution by the savages who
prepared their attacks in the shadow of Fort
Niagara ; the battles of Chippewaand of Lundy's
Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with
that of the fall ; the savage forays with toma-
hawk 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 pre-
cious books that make our meagre past wear
something of the rich romance of old European
days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the
splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of
mediaeval martyrdom, — and then, lacking this
light, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of
the 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.

Niagara 183

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 enter-
taining fables. They pleasantly exercised their
sympathies upon those who every year perish
at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power ;
only they refused their cheap and selfish com-
passion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who
dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclu-
sion, and was finally carried over the cataract.
This public character they suspected of design
in his death as in his life, and they would not be
moved by his memory ; though they gave a sigh
to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet
not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought
to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all
the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon
Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and
who actually laid the corner-stone of the new
temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place
visited by so many thousands every year. The
shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged,
and form a deceitful privacy, in which, even at
that early hour of the day, they met many other
pairs. It seemed incredible that the village
and the hotels should be so full, and that the
wilderness should also abound in them ; yet on
every embowered seat, and going to and from

184

Their Wedding Journey

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

Public Love-Making

up the broad swift stream to the point where it
ran smooth before breaking into the rapids ;
and as a soft pastoral feature in the foreground
of that magnificent landscape, they found them

Niagara 185

far from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the
foreground of every famous American land-
scape ; and when I think of the amount of pub-
lic 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 nineteenth century is the
golden age, and that we want very little of be-
ing a nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the
Canadian rapids, having traversed the island by
a path through the heart of the woods, and now
drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of
the prodigious pageant have an eternal novelty,
and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that
constant sublimity with the sense of discov-
erers, or rather of people whose great fortune
it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new
from the creating hand. The morning hour
"lent its sunny charm to this illusion, while in
the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark
with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night
seemed to linger. There was a wild fluttering
of their nerves, a rapture with an under-con-
sciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and
escape, when they came to the three little isles
that extend from Goat Island, one beyond
another far out into the furious channel. Three

1 86 Their Wedding Journey

pretty suspension bridges connect them now
with the larger island, and under each of these
flounders a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to
mingle with the ruin of the fall. The Three
Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness,
clumps of vine-tangled woods, planted upon
masses of rock ; but they are part of the fasci-
nation of Niagara which no one resists ; nor
could Isabel have been persuaded from explor-
ing them. It wants no courage to do this, but
merely submission to the local sorcery, and the
adventurer has no other reward than the con-
sciousness of having been where but a few
years before no human being had perhaps set
foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge with a
quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outer-
most 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 her-
self with a desperate struggle. The exertion
told heavily upon her strength unawares, and
she suddenly made Basil another revelation of
character. Without the slightest warning she
sank down at the root of a tree, and said, with
serious composure, that she could never go
back on those bridges ; they were not safe.
He stared at her cowering form in blank amaze,
and put his hands in his pockets. Then it oc-

Niagara 187

curred to his dull masculine sense that it must
be a joke ; and he said, " Well, I '11 have you
taken off in a boat."

" Oh, do, Basil, do have me taken off in a
boat ! " implored Isabel. " You see yourself
the bridges are not safe. Do get a boat."

" Or a balloon," he suggested, humoring the
pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears ; and now he went on
his knees at her side, and took her hands in his.
"Isabel! Isabel! Are you crazy?" he cried,
as if he meant to go mad himself. She moaned
and shuddered in reply; he said, to mend mat-
ters, 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
set up a hermitage here, and have your meals
sent out from the hotel ? It 's a charming spot,
and visited pretty constantly ; but it 's small,
even for a hermitage."

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

He would try kindness. " Perhaps, darling,
you '11 let me carry you ashore."

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

1 88 Their Wedding Journey

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

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

" I don't know," said Basil gloomily. " It 's
an exigency for which I wasn't prepared."
Then he silently gave himself to the Evil One
for having probably overwrought Isabel's nerves
by repeating that poem about Avery, and by
the ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had
seemed to enjoy so much. He asked her if
that was it ; and she answered, " Oh no, it 's no-
thing 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 '11 be sorry for after-
wards, Basil," she replied, with the forbearance
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
situation overwhelmed him. He dared not at-
tempt to carry her ashore, for she might spring

Niagara 189

from his grasp into the flood. He could not
leave her to call for help ; and what if nobody
came till she lost her mind from terror? Or,
what if somebody should come and find them
in that' ridiculous affliction ?

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
convulsively 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

190 Their Wedding Journey

notice that persons have been killed by pieces
of rock from the precipice overhanging the
shore below, and warning people that they
descend at their peril. Isabel declined to visit
the Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs
lead, but was willing to risk the ascent of
Terrapin Tower. "Thanks; no," said her hus-
band. " You might find it unsafe to come back
the way you went up. We can't count cer-
tainly upon the appearance of the lady who
is so much like you ; and I 've no fancy for
spending my life on Terrapin Tower." So he
found her a seat, and went alone to the top
of the audacious little structure standing on
the verge of the cataract, between the smooth
curve of the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured
front of the Central Fall, with the stormy sea
of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen
through the mists, crawling away between its
lofty bluffs before. He knew again the awful
delight with which so long ago he had watched
the changes in the beauty of the Canadian Fall
as it hung a mass of translucent green from
the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl
up from the abyss and penetrate all its sub-
stance 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 ;

Niagara

191

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

The Frisky Elderly Gentleman

an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery
stone to another, and looking down from time
to time into the abyss, who, when he had
amused himself long enough in this way,
clambered up on the plank bridge. Basil, who
had descended by this time, made bold to say
that he thought the diversion an odd one and
rather dangerous. The gentleman took this in

192 Their Wedding Journey

good part, and owned it might seem so, but added
that a distinguished phrenologist had examined
his head, and told him he had equilibrium so
large that he could go anywhere.

"On your bridal tour, I presume," he con-
tinued, as they approached the bench where
Basil had left Isabel. She had now the com-
pany of a plain, middle-aged woman, whose
attire hesitatingly expressed some inward fes-
tivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionable-
ness. " Well, this is my third bridal tour to
Niagara, and wife 's been here once before on
the same business. We see a good many
changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with
the others. Now that 's all gone. Well, old
lady, shall we move on ? " he asked ; and this
bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply,
by the guardian spirits of those who gave the
place so many sad yet pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the
table next Basil's, and they were all now talking
cheerfully 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 '11 believe anything sooner than the
truth."

" Oh yes, indeed," said Kitty, " I 've got a

Niagara 193

good deal of it made up already. I '11 describe
a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable
people from all parts of the country, and the
gentlemen I danced with the most. I 'm going
to have had quite a flirtation with the gentle-
man of the long blond mustache, whom we
met on the bridge this morning, and he's got to
do duty in accounting for my missing glove.
It '11 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 upon by
their black servants."

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom
Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from
Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North
for the first time since the war. He had an air
at once fierce and sad, and a half-barbaric, hom-
icidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in
its way. He sat with his wife at a table farther
down the room, and their child was served in
part by a little 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 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.

194 Their Wedding Journey

"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 fungous crop of sentiment, and they
may yet outflourish the remains of the feudal
system in the kind of poetry they produce.
The impoverished slaveholder is a pathetic
figure, in spite of all justice and reason ; the
beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and
it is of no use to think of Andersonville in his
presence. This gentleman, and others like
him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts.
They spent the "money they did not earn like
princes ; they held their heads high ; they
trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair ; they
received the homage of the dough-face in his
home. They came up here from their rice-
swamps and cotton-fields, and bullied the whole
busy civilization of the North. Everybody who
had merchandise or principles to sell truckled
to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphal
progress. Now they're moneyless and subju-
gated (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 no
great wonder they got to despise us, seeing

Niagara

'95

what most of us were. It seems to me I should
like to know our friend. I can't help feeling
towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven
help my craven spirit ! I wonder how our
colored waiter feels towards him. I dare say he
admires him immensely."

There were not above a dozen other people
in the room, and Basil contrasted the scene

The Empty Dining-Room

with that which the same place " formerly pre-
sented. " 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

196 Their Wedding Journey

miss it. I wonder if our Southern friend misses
it ? They gave us a very small allowance of
brass band when we arrived, Isabel. Upon my
word, I wonder what 's come over the place,"
he said, as the Southern party, rising from the
table, walked out of the dining-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 Niag-
ara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled
surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and
its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly
strange that the Neutral Nation should have
revered the cataract as a demon ; and another
subtle spell (not to be broken even by the busi-
ness-like composure of the man who shows off
the hell-broth) is added to those successive sor-
ceries by which Niagara gradually changes from
a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all
odds, too, the most tremendous view of the
Falls is afforded by the point on this drive
whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe,
and behold its three massive walls of sea round-
ing and sweeping into the gulf together, the
color gone, and the smooth brink showing black
and ridgy.

Niagara 197

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 of his former visit.
" They have a sort of tower of observation built
on the battle-ground," he said, as they drove on
down by the river, " and it was in charge of an
old Canadian militia-man, who had helped his
countrymen to be beaten in the fight. This
hero gave me a simple and unintelligible account
of the battle, asking me first if I had ever heard
of General Scott, and adding without flinching
that here he got his earliest laurels. He seemed
to go just so long to every listener, and nothing
could stop him short, so I fell into a reverie
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
piano and a girl's voice rose from a bowery cot-
tage near, that all the pure air had once been
tainted with battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields
had been planted with cannon, instead of pota-
toes and corn, and that where the cows came
down the farmer's lane, with tinkling bells, the
shock of armed men had befallen. The blue and
tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away
rolled the beautiful land, with farmhouses, fields,
and woods, and at the foot of the tower lay the

198 Their Wedding Journey.

pretty village. The battle of the past seemed
only a vagary of mine ; yet how could I doubt
the warrior at my elbow ? — grieved though I
was to find that a habit of strong drink had the
better of his utterance that morning. My driver
explained afterwards, that persons visiting the
field were commonly so much pleased with the
captain's eloquence that they kept the noble
old soldier in a br an dy-and- water rapture through-
out the season, thereby greatly refreshing his
memory, and making the battle bloodier and
bloodier as the season advanced and the number
of visitors increased. There my dear," he sud-
denly broke off, as they came in sight of a
slender stream of water that escaped from the
brow of a cliff on the American side below the
Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery
mist, "that 's the Bridal Veil ; and I suppose you
think the stream, which is making such a fine
display, yonder, is some idle brooklet, ending a
long course of error and worthlessness by that
spectacular plunge. It 's nothing of the kind ;
it 's an honest hydraulic canal, of the most
straightforward character ; a poor but respect-
able mill-race which has devoted itself strictly
to business, and has turned mill-wheels instead
of fooling round water-lilies. It can afford that
ultimate finery. What you behold in the Bridal
Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry."

Niagara 199

"What I can't help thinking of," said Isabel,
who had not paid the smallest attention to the
Bridal Veil, or anything about it, " is the awful-
ness of stepping off these places in the night-
time." She referred to the road which, next
the precipice, is unguarded by any sort of par-
apet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it,
but we manage things differently on our con-
tinent, and carriages go ruining over the brink
from time to time.

" If your thoughts have that direction," an-
swered 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.

"I'm not afraid," she sighed, "but in the
words of the retreating soldier, * I 'm awfully
demoralized ; ' " and added, " You know we must
reserve some of the vital forces for shopping
this evening."

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

200 Their Wedding Journey

by some military title. Recommended the trip
they were about to make as the most magnifi-
cent and beautiful on the whole continent, and
he commended them for intending to make it.
He said that was Mrs. General Bowder of Phila-
delphia 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 thereby brevetted them rich and fashionable,
could not secure a stateroom for them on the
boat, — a perfectly splendid Lake steamer, which
would take them down the rapids of the St.
Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change,
— but he would give them a letter to the cap-
tain, who was a very particular friend of his,
and would be happy to show them as \\\§ friends
every attention ; and so he wrote a note ascrib-
ing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all
reason making him feel for the moment that he
was privileged by a document which was no
doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke
in a loud cheerful voice ; he laughed jollily at no
apparent joke ; he bowed very low and said,
" £<9^-evening ! " at parting, and they went away
as if he had blessed them.

Niagara 201

The rest of the evening they spent in wander-
ing through the village, charmed with its bizarre
mixture of quaintness and commonplaceness ;
in hanging about the shop-windows with their
monotonous variety of feather fans, — each with
a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed
in its centre, — moccasins, bead-wrought work-
bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and
whatever else the savage art of the neighboring
squaws can invent ; in sauntering through these
gay booths, pricing many things, and in hang-
ing long and undecidedly over cases full of feld-
spar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces,
and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher,
and other vessel that can be fashioned out of
the geological formations at Niagara, tormented
meantime by the heat of the 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 magnificent thing of deep magenta dye shad-
ing into blue, with a whole yellow-bird trans-
fixed in the centre. When he triumphantly
displayed it in their room, " Who 's that for,
Basil?" demanded his wife; "the cook?"

202 Their Wedding Journey

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 me ! " and
seemed about to die of laughter.

" Did n't you start and throw up your hands,"
he stammered, "when you came to that case of
fans?"

" Yes, — in horror! Did you think I liked
the cruel things, with their dead birds and their
hideous colors ? O Basil, dearest ! You are
incorrigible. Cant you learn that magenta is
the vilest of all the hues that the perverseness
of man has invented in defiance of nature ?
Now, my love, just promise me orie~ thing," she
said pathetically. " We 're going to do a little
shopping in Montreal, you know ; and perhaps
you'll be wanting to surprise me with some-
thing 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 '11 be some taste
about it, and I shall be truly surprised and
pleased."

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and
he murmured something about exchanging it.
" No," she said, " we '11 keep it as a — a — mon-
ument." And she deposed him, with another
peal of laughter, from the proud height to
which he had climbed in pity of her nervous

Buying the Little Keepsake

Niagara 205

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 Sis-
ter ; and when Isabel said, " Oh, why wont men
use their reasoning faculties ? " he could not for
himself have claimed any, and he could not urge
the truth : that he had bought the fan more
for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty.
She would not let him get angry, and he could
say nothing against the half-ironical petting with
which she soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and
the next morning they spent a charming hour
about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over
Goat Island, somewhat daintily tasting the
flavors of the place on whose wonders they had
so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first.
They had already the feeling of veteran visitors,
and they loftily marveled at the greed with
which 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 contempt.

206 Their Wedding Journey

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 seen from any point it is the most
impressive feature of the whole prodigious spec-
tacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those
inland seas of the North, Superior, Huron,
Michigan, Erie, and the multitude of smaller
lakes, all pour their floods, where they swirl in
dreadful vortices, with resistless under-currents
boiling beneath the surface of that mighty eddy.
Abruptly from this scene of secret power, so
different from the thunderous splendors of the
cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to
a height of two hundred feet, clothed from the
water's edge almost to their crests with dark
cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses per-
ceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then,
drunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away
to Ontario through the narrow channel of the
river. Awful as the scene is, you stand so far
above it that you do not know the half of its
terribleness ; for those waters that look so
smooth are great ridges and rings, forced, by
the impulse of the currents, twelve feet higher
in the centre than at the margin. Nothing can
live there, and with what is caught in its hold,
the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls and

Niagara 207

tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad,
maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly
stories, which even their telling does not wholly
rob of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned
men carried into the whirlpool and made to
enact upon its dizzy surges a travesty of life,
apparently floating there at their pleasure,
diving and frolicking amid the waves, or fran-
tically struggling to escape from the death that
has long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the
railway suspension bridge, is an elevator more
than a hundred and eighty feet high, which is
meant to let people down to the shore below,
and to give a view of the rapids on their own
level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a ter-
ribly frail structure of pine sticks, but is doubt-
less stronger than it looks ; and at any rate, as
it has never yet fallen to pieces, it may be
pronounced perfectly 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 structure, where it was darkened by a rough
weather-boarding, or lower down, where the

208 Their Wedding Journey

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
value of the scene below, and she could not
look forward to escape from her present perils
by the conveyance which had brought her into
them with any satisfaction. She wanly smiled,
and shrank closer to Basil ; while the other
matron made nothing of seizing her husband
violently by the arm and imploring him to
stop it whenever they experienced a rougher
jolt than usual.

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped
out of their prison by a humid young English-
man, 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 ;

Niagara

209

they arose far aloft
in vast bulks of
clear green, and
broke heavily into
foam at the crest.
Great blocks and
shapeless frag-
ments of rock
strewed the mar-
gin of the awful
torrent ; gloomy
walls of dark stone
rose naked from
these, bearded here
and there with
cedar, and every-
where frowning
with shaggy brows
of evergreen. The
place is inexpres-
sibly lonely and
dreadful, and one
feels like an alien
presence there, or as if he had intruded upon
some mood or haunt of Nature in which she had
a right to be forever alone. The slight, impu-
dent structure of the elevator rises through the
solitude like a thing that merits ruin, yet it is
better than something more elaborate, for it

The Rapids

210 Their Wedding Journey

looks temporary, and since there must be an
elevator, it is well to have it of the most transi-
tory aspect. Some such quality of rude imper-
manence 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 resig-
nation. When they stepped out of their trap
into the waiting - room ' at the top, "What I
like about these little adventures," said Mr.
Richard to Basil, abruptly, " is getting safely
out of t*hem. Good-morning, sir." He bowed
slightly to Isabel, who returned his politeness,
and exchanged faint nods, or glances, with the
ladies. They got into their separate carriages,
and at that safe distance made each other more
decided obeisances.

"Well," observed Basil, "I suppose we 're
introduced now. We shall be meeting them
from time to time throughout our journey.
You know how the same faces and the same
trunks used to keep turning up in our travels
on the other side. Once meet people in trav-
eling, and you can't get rid of them."

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

Niagara 2 1 1

" 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 stranger and dreadfuller. Somehow
it 's begun to pervade me and possess me in
a very uncomfortable way ; I'm tossed upon
rapids, and flung from cataract brinks, and diz-
zied 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 '11 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 every-
thing nowadays, and for a few hours we have it
our own way, and pay our little tributes of ad-
miration with as much complacency as we feel
in acknowledging the existence of the Supreme
Being. But after a while we are aware of some
potent influence undermining our self-satisfac-
tion ; we begin to conjecture that the great cata-
ract does not exist by virtue of our approval, and
to feel that it will not cease when we go away.
The second day makes us its abject slaves, and
on the third we want to fly from it in terror. I
believe some people stay for weeks, however,

2 1 2 Their Wedding Journey

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 this season, but that it should ever be
full. I wish we 'd gone after our first look at
the Falls from the suspension bridge. How
beautiful that was ! I rejoice in everything that
I have n't done. I 'm so glad I have n't been in
the Cave of the Winds ; I'm so happy that Table
Rock fell twenty years ago ! Basil, I could n't
stand another rainbow to-day. I 'm sorry we
went out on the Three Weird Sisters. Oh, 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
moment's oblivion, and then rose radiant with
a question : " Why in the world, if Niagara is
really what it seems to us now, do so many
bridal parties come here?"

" Perhaps they 're the only people who 've
the strength to bear up against it, and are not
easily dispersed and 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 twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and
not turned of thirty ? "

Niagara 213

" Basil, you 're very cruel."

" No, no. But don't you see how it is ?
We 've known too much of life to desire any
gloomy background for our happiness. We 're
quite contented to have things gay and bright
about us. Once we could n't have made the
circle dark enough. Well, my dear, that 's the
effect of age. We're superannuated."

" I used to think / was before we were mar-
ried," 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 * £er silken mantle (or
whatever) slipped from her shoulder, and he
embracingly replaced it, flattering himself that
he had delicately seized this chance of an un-
avowed caress and not knowing (oh, 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 traveling-dress ; two occupied the parlor as

214 Their Wedding Journey

they passed out ; half a dozen happy pairs ar-
rived (to the music of the band) in the omni-
bus that was to carry our friends back to the
station ; they caught sight of several about the
shop windows, as they drove through the streets.
Thus the place perpetually renews itself in the
glow of love as long as the summer lasts. The
moon, which is elsewhere so often of wormwood,
or of the ordinary green cheese at the best, is
of lucent honey there from the first of June to
the last of October ; and this is a great charm
in Niagara. I think with tenderness of all the
lives that have opened so fairly there ; the
hopes that have reigned in the glad young
hearts ; the measureless tide of joy that ebbs
and flows with the arriving and departing trains.
Elsewhere there are carking cares of business
and of fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and
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
towards the weak sisterhood of evident brides,
and both our friends felt a lurking fondness for
Niagara at the last moment. I do not know
how much of their content was due to the fact
that they had suffered no sort of wrong there
from those who are apt to prey upon travelers.
In the hotel a placard warned them to have

Niagara 215

nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen on
the streets, but always to order their carriage at
the office ; on the street the hackmen whispered
to them not to trust the exorbitant drivers in
league with the landlords ; yet their actual ex-
perience was great reasonableness and facile
contentment with the sum agreed upon. This
may have been because the hackmen so far
outnumbered the visitors that the latter could
dictate terms ; but they chose to believe it
a triumph of civilization ; and I will never be
the cynic to sneer at their faith. Only at the
station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in
doubt, by the hotel porter who professed to
find Basil's trunk enfeebled by travel, and ad-
vised a strap for it, which a friend of his would
sell for a dollar and a half. Yet even he may
have been a benevolent nature unjustly sus-
pected.

VII

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE

THEY were to take
the Canadian steamer
at Charlotte, the port
of Rochester, and they
rattled uneventfully
down from Niagara by
rail. At the broad, low-
banked river - mouth
the steamer lay beside
the railroad station ;
and while Isabel dis-
posed of herself on
board, Basil looked to
the transfer of the
baggage, novelly com-
forted 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

The Pilot

Doivn the St. Lawrence

217

of their destination ; and there was that indefin-
able something in his manner which hinted his
hope that you would remember the porter ; but
he was so civil that he did not snub the meekest
and most vexatious of the passengers, and Basil

Securing their Stateroom Keys

mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white
Americans, he said to himself, would behave so
decently in his place ; and he could not conceive
of the American steamboat clerk who would use
the politeness towards a waiting crowd that the
Canadian purser showed when they all wedged

2i8 Their Wedding Journey

themselves in about his window to receive their
stateroom keys. He was somewhat awkward,
like the porter, but he was patient, and he did
not lose his temper even when some of the
crowd, finding he would not bully them, made
bold to bully him. He was three times as long
in serving them as an American would have
been, but their time was of no value there, and
he served them well. Basil made a point of
speaking him fair, when his turn came, and the
purser did not trample on him for a base truck-
ler, 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 sufficient for its purpose, with a vis-
ible captain, who answered two or three ques-
tions very pleasantly, and bore himself towards
his passengers in some sort like a host.

In the saloon Isabel had found among the
passengers her semi-acquaintances of the hotel
parlor and the Rapids elevator, and had glanced
tentatively towards them. Whereupon the
matron of the party had made advances that
ended in their all sitting down together and
wondering when the boat would start, and what
time they would get to Montreal next evening,
with other matters that strangers going upon
the same journey may properly marvel over in

Do^vn the St. Lawrence

219

company. The in-
troduction having
thus accomplished
itself, they ex-
changed address-
es, 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 pres-
ently towards the
different state-
rooms ; but the
new acquaintances sat vis-a-vis at the table,
and after supper the ladies drew their chairs
together on the promenade deck and enjoyed
the fresh evening breeze. The sun set magnifi-
cent upon the low western shore which they had
now left an hour away, and a broad stripe of
color stretched behind the steamer. A few thin,
luminous clouds darkened momently along the
horizon, and then mixed with the land. The
stars came out in a clear sky, and a light wind

A Cosy Corner

220 Their Wedding Journey

softly buffeted the cheeks, and breathed life
into nerves that the day's heat had wasted. It
scarcely wrinkled the tranquil expanse of the
lake, on which loomed, far or near, a full-sailed
schooner, and presently melted into the twi-
light, and left the steamer solitary upon the
waters. The company was small, and not re-
markable enough in anyway to take the thoughts
of any one off his own comfort. A deep sense
of the cosiness of the situation possessed
them all, which was if possible intensified by
the spectacle of the captain seated on the up-
per deck and smoking a cigar that flashed and
fainted like a stationary firefly in the gathering
dusk. How very distant, in this mood, were the
most recent events ! Niagara seemed a fable
of antiquity ; the ride from Rochester a myth
of the Middle Ages. In this cool, 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 unin-
teresting, 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

Down the St. Lawrence 221

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 of 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-na-
tured and sympathetic. This Miss Ellison, why,
I can tell you, I should n't be ashamed of her
anywhere." By anywhere Isabel meant Bos-
ton, and she went on to praise the young lady's
intelligence and refinement, with those expres-
sions of surprise at the existence of civilization
in a Westerner which Westerners find it so hard
to receive graciously. Happily, Miss Ellison
had not to hear them. "The reason she 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 Ni-
agara 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

222 Their Wedding Journey

journey in this original way. She did n't force
her confidence upon me, any more than she tried
to withhold it. We got to talking in the most
natural manner ; and she seemed to tell these
things about herself because they amused her
and she liked me. I had been saying how my
trunk got left behind once on the French side
of Mont Cenis, and I had to wear aunt's things
at Turin till it could be sent for."

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

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

" Oh, you did ! "

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

" And do we ? "

" No," came the answer, somewhat ruefully.
" Perhaps, Basil," she added, " we 've been a
little too successful in disguising our bridal
character. Do you know," she continued, look-
ing him anxiously in the face, " this Miss Elli-
son took me at first for — your sister ! "

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter.
"One more such victory," he said, "and we are

Down the St. Lawrence 223

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 giv-
ing a sense of English solidity by the stone of
which it is largely built. There was an acces-
sion of many passengers here, and they and the
people on the wharf were as little like Ameri-
cans as possible. They were English or Irish
or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old
World still upon their faces, or if Canadians
they looked not less hearty; so that one must
wonder if the line between the Dominion and
the United States did not also sharply separate
good digestion and dyspepsia. These provin-
cials had not our regularity of features, nor the
best of them our careworn sensibility of expres-
sion ; but neither had -they our complexions of
adobe ; and even Isabel was forced to allow that

224 Their Wedding Journey

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 Frontenac's splendid advent among the
Indians ; of the brave La Salle, who turned its
wooden walls to stone ; of wars with the savages
and then with the New York colonists, whom
the French and their allies harried from this
point ; of the destruction of La Salle's fort in
the Old French War ; and of final surrender a
few years later to the English. It is as pic-
turesque as it is historical. All about the city
the shores are beautifully wooded, and there are
many lovely islands, — the first indeed of those
Thousand Islands with which the head of the
St. Lawrence is filled, and among which the
steamer was presently threading her way. They
are still as charming and still almost as wild as
when, in 1673, Frontenac's flotilla of canoes
passed through their labyrinth and issued upon
the lake, Save for a lighthouse upon one of

Down tJie St. Lawrence 225

them, there is almost nothing to show that the
foot of man has ever pressed the thin grass
clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping
its green in the eternal shadow of their pines
and cedars. In the warm morning light they
gathered or dispersed before the advancing ves-
sel, which some of them almost touched with

A mong tJie Thousand Islands

the plumage of their evergreens ; and where
none of them were large, some were so small
that it would not have been too bold to figure
them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling
and separating in her course. It is curiously
affecting to find them so unclaimed yet from the
solitude of the vanished wilderness, and scarcely
touched even by tradition. But for the interest
left them by the French, these tiny islands have
scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed

226 Their Wedding Journey

for their beauty alone. There is indeed about
them a faint light of legend concerning the
Canadian rebellion of 1837, f°r several patriots
are said to have taken refuge amidst their lovely
multitude ; but this episode of modern history
is difficult for the imagination to manage, and
somehow one does not take sentimentally even
to that daughter of a lurking patriot who long
baffled her father's pursuers by rowing him from
one island to another, and supplying him with
food by night.

Either the reluctance is from the natural de-
sire 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 hand-
some girl in the blue and white striped Gari-
baldi and Swiss hat, who had come aboard at
Kingston. She pointed her out, and coura-
geously 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 deli-
cate 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.

Down the St. Lawrence 227

She was not so ethereal in her loveliness as an
American girl, but she was not so nervous and
had none of the painful fragility of the latter.
Her expression was just a little vacant, it must
be owned ; but so far as she went she was
faultless. She looked like the most tractable
of daughters, and as if she would be the most
obedient of wives. She had a blameless taste
in dress, Isabel declared ; her costume of blue
and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set
upon heavy masses of dark brown hair) being
completed by a black silk skirt. " And you can
see," she added, " that it 's an old skirt made
over, and that she 's dressed as cheaply as she
is prettily." This surprised Basil, who had im-
puted the young lady's personal sumptuousness
to her dress, and had thought it enormously
rich. When she got off with her cliaperone 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 crea-
tures ? Where did she get her taste, her fash-
ions, 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

228 Their Wedding Journey

presence. They perceived that beauty was not
only its own excuse for being, but that it flat-
tered and favored and profited the world by con-
senting to be.

At Prescott, the boat on which they had
come from Charlotte, and on which they had
been promised a passage without change to
Montreal, stopped, and they were transferred to
a smaller steamer with the uncomfortable name
of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirm
and dirty, and in every way bore out the
character of a squalid Irish goblin. Besides,
she was already heavily laden with passengers,
and, with the addition of the other steamer's
people, had now doubled her complement ; 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,
however, and thus partly atoned for their num-
bers. Among them -of course there was a full
force of brides from Niagara and elsewhere, and
some curious forms of the prevailing infatuation
appeared. It is well enough, if she likes, and it
may even be very noble for a passably good-
looking young lady to marry a gentleman of
venerable age ; but to intensify the idea of self-
devotion by furtively caressing his wrinkled
front seems too reproachful of the general
public ; while, on the other hand, if the bride is

Down the St. Lawrence 229

very young and pretty, it enlists in behalf of
the white-haired husband the unwilling sympa-
thies of the spectator to see her the centre of
a group of young people, and him only acknow-
ledged from time to time by a Parthian snub.
Nothing, however, could have been more satis-
factory 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 liveli-
ness 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 Celtic laughter.
One of the young fellows presently lost his hat
overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief of
his lady about his head ; and this appeared to
be really one of the best things in the world,
and led to endless banter. They were well
dressed, and it could be imagined that the an-
cient bridegroom had come in for the support
of the whole 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

230 Their Wedding Journey

keep their pitying eyes off 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 stir-
ring, and to have the best view of the Rapids,
the Banshee's whole company was gathered
upon the forward promenade, and the throng
was almost as dense as in a six-o'clock horse-
car out from Boston. The standing and sit-
ting 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 pro-
voked social feeling, and she was secretly glad
when after a while they shifted their position.

It was deadly hot, and most of the people
saddened and silenced in the heat. From time
to time the clouds idling about overhead met
and sprinkled down a cruel little shower of rain
that seemed to make the air less breatheable
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 Hud-
son, and is far more like its far-off cousin the
Mississippi. Its banks are low like the Missis-

Down the St. Lawrence 231

sippi's, its current swift, its way through soli-
tary lands. The same sentiment of early ad-
venture hangs about each : both are haunted by
visions of the Jesuit in his priestly robe, and
the soldier in his mediaeval steel ; the same gay,
devout, and dauntless race has touched them
both with immortal romance. If .the water were
of a dusky golden color, instead of translucent
green, and the shores and islands were covered
with cottonwoods and willows instead of dark
cedars, one could with no great effort believe
one's self on the Mississippi between Cairo and
St. Louis, so much do the great rivers strike
one as kindred in the chief features of their
landscape. Only, in tracing this resemblance
you do not know just what to do with the
purple mountains of Vermont, seen vague
against the horizon from the St. Lawrence, or
with the quaint little French villages that begin
to show themselves as you penetrate farther
down into Lower Canada. These look so peace-
ful, with their dormer-windowed cottages cluster-
ing about their church-spires, that it seems im-
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,

Their Wedding Journey

in which was kindled the torch that wrapt Deer-
field in flames, waking her people from their
sleep to meet instant death or taste the bitter-
ness 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, " Should n't you
like to know the origin, personal history, and
secret feelings of a gentleman who goes about
in a duster of that particular tint ? Or, that
gentleman yonder with his eye tied up in a wet

Doivn the St. Lawrence 233

handkerchief, do you suppose he 's traveling
for pleasure ? Look at those young people from
Omaha : they have n't ceased flirting or cack-
ling since we left Kingston. Do you think
everybody has such spirits out at Omaha ? But
behold a yet more surprising figure than any
we have yet seen among this boat-load of non-
descripts ! "

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a
face of somewhat foreign cast, and well dressed,
with a certain impressive difference
from the rest in the cut of his clothes.
But what most drew the eye to him
was a large cross, set with brilliants,
and surmounted by a heavy double-
headed eagle in gold. This orna-
ment dazzled from a conspicuous
place on the left lappel of his coat ;
on his hand shone a magnificent dia-
mond ring, and he bore a stately
opera-glass, with which, from time
to time, he imperiously, as one may
say, surveyed the landscape. As
the imposing apparition grew upon
Isabel, "Oh, here," she thought,
" is something truly distinguished.
Of course, dear," she added aloud to
Basil, " he 's some foreign nobleman ^
traveling here ;" and she ran over The Nobleman

234 Their Wedding Journey

in her mind the newspaper announcements of
patrician visitors from abroad and tried to iden-
tify him with some one of them. The cross
must be the decoration of a foreign order, and
Basil suggested that he was perhaps a member
of some legation at Washington, who had 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 civil-
ized for a Russian.

" Yes, indeed ! What an air he has. Never
tell me, Basil, that there's nothing in blood f"
cried Isabel, who was a bitter aristocrat at heart,
like all her sex, though in principle she was dem-
ocratic enough. As she spoke, the object of her
regard looked about him on the different groups,
not with pride, not with hauteur, but with a
glance of unconscious, unmistakable superiority.
" Oh, that stare ! " she added ; " nothing but
high birth and long descent can give it ! Dear-
est, he 's becoming a great affliction to me. I
want to know who he is. Could n't you invent
some pretext for speaking to him ?"

" No, I could n'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 's really dreadful. You can easily see that 's

Down the St. Lawrence 235

distinction," she continued, as her hero moved
about the promenade and gently but loftily
made a way for himself among the other passen-
gers and favored the scenery through his opera-
glass from one point and another. He spoke
to no one, and she reasonably supposed that he
did not know English.

In the mean time it was drawing near the hour
of dinner, but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one,
two came and went, and then at last came the
dinner, which had been delayed, it seemed, till
the cook could recruit his energies sufficiently
to meet the wants of double the number he had
expected to provide for. It was observable of
the officers and crew of the Banshee, that while
they did not hold themselves aloof from the
passengers in the disdainful American manner,
they were of feeble mind, and not only did
everything very slowly (in the usual Canadian
fashion), but with an inefficiency that among us
would have justified them in being insolent.
The people sat down at several successive tables
to the worst dinner that ever was cooked ; the
ladies first, and the gentlemen afterwards, as
they made conquest of places. At the second
table, to Basil's great satisfaction, he found a
seat, and on his right hand the distinguished
foreigner.

"Naturally, I was somewhat abashed," he

236 Their Wedding Journey

said in the account he was presently called to
give Isabel of the interview, " but I remembered
that I was an American citizen, and tried to
maintain a decent composure. For several min-
utes we sat silent behind a dish of flabby cucum-
bers, expecting the dinner, and I was wondering
whether I should address him in French or Ger-
man, — for I knew you 'd never forgive me if
I let slip such a chance, — when he turned and
spoke himself."

" Oh what did he say, dearest ? "

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

"• 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 noble-
man. ' Oh,' 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 ! "

" Well, ask him yourself, then," returned
Basil ; " he 's a very good fellow. * Oh, that
stare ! nothing but high birth and long descent
could give it ! ' " he repeated, abominably imply-
ing that he had himself had no share in their
common error.

Down the St. Lawrence

237

What retort Isabel might have made cannot
now be known, for she was arrested at this mo-
ment by a rumor amongst the passengers that
they were coming to the Long Sault Rapids.

Looking forward she
saw the tossing and
flashing of surges that,
to the eye, are certain-
ly as threatening as
the rapids above Niag-
ara. The steamer had
already passed the De-
plau and the Galopes, ,JI
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. Law- in the Pilot House
rence. 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 thrilling and pic-
turesque and wildly beautiful : the children crow
and laugh, the women shout forth their delight,
as the boat enters the seething current ; great
foaming waves strike her bows, and brawl away
to the stern, while she dips, and rolls, and shoots
onward, light as a bird blown by the wind ;

238 Their Wedding Journey

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
fills the air ; beneath the smoother sweeps of
the current you can see the brown rocks ; as
you sink from ledge to ledge in the writhing
and twisting steamer, you have a vague sense
that all this is perhaps an achievement rather
than an enjoyment. When, descending the
Long Sault, you look back up hill, and behold
those billows leaping down the steep slope after
you, "No doubt," you confide to your soul, "it
is magnificent ; but it is not pleasure." You
greet with silent satisfaction the level river,
stretching between the Long Sault and the Co-
teau, and you admire the delightful tranquillity
of that beautiful Lake St. Francis into which
it expands. Then the boat shudders into the
Coteau Rapids, and down through the Cedars
and Cascades. On the rocks of the last lies
the skeleton of a steamer wrecked upon them,
and gnawed at still by the white-tusked wolfish
rapids. No one, they say, was lost from her.
"But how," Basil thought, "would it fare with
all these people packed here upon her bow, if
the Banshee should swing round upon a ledge ? "
As to Isabel, she looked upon the wrecked

Down the St. Lawrence

239

The Long Sault Rapids

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 awful-
lest of all ! "

They passed the Lake St. Louis ; the La
Chine Rapids flashed into sight. The captain

240 Their Wedding Journey

rose up from his seat, took his pipe from his
mouth, and waved a silence with it. " Ladies
and gentlemen," said he, "it's very important
in passing these rapids to keep the boat per-
fectly trim. Please to remain just as you are."

It was twilight, for the boat was late. From
the Indian village on the shore they signaled to
know if he wanted the local pilot ; the captain
refused ; and then the steamer plunged into the
leaping waves. From rock to rock she swerved
and sank ; on the last ledge she scraped with a
deadly touch that went to the heart.

Then the danger was passed, and the noble
city of Montreal was in full sight, lying at the
foot of her dark green mountain, and lifting her
many spires into the rosy twilight air : massive
and grand showed the sister towers of the
French cathedral.

Basil had hoped to approach this famous city
with just associations. He had meant to con-
jure up for Isabel's sake some reflex, however
faint, of that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has
painted of Maisonneuve founding and conse-
crating Montreal. He flushed with the recol-
lection of the historian's phrase ; but in that
moment there came forth from the cabin a
pretty young person who gave every token of
being a pretty young actress, even to the
duenna-like elderly female companion, to be

Down the St. Lawrence 241

detected in the remote background of every
young actress. She had flirted audaciously
during the day with some young Englishmen
and Canadians of her acquaintance, and after
passing the La Chine Rapids she had taken
the hearts of all the men by springing suddenly
to her feet, apostrophizing the tumult with a
charming attitude, and warbling a delicious bit
of song. Now as they drew near the city the
Victoria Bridge stretched its long tube athwart
the river, and looked so 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 prov-
ince, and whose heavy gallantries she had
constantly received with a gay, impertinent
nonchalance, — "I wonder if we can be going
right under that bridge ? "

"No, sir!" answered the pretty young ac-
tress with shocking promptness, " we 're going
right over it, —

' Three groans and a guggle,
And an awful struggle,
And over we go ! ' "

At this witless, sweet impudence the Cana-
dian looked very sheepish — for a beaver ; and
all the other people laughed ; but the noble his-

242

Their Wedding Journey

torical shades of Basil's thought vanished in
wounded dignity beyond recall, and left him
feeling rather ashamed, — for he had laughed
too.

Victoria Bridge

VIII

THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL

THE feeling of foreign travel for which our
tourists had striven throughout their journey,
and which they had known in some degree at
Kingston and all the way down the river, was
intensified from the first moment in Montreal ;
and it was so welcome that they were almost
glad to lose money on their greenbacks, which
the conductor of the omnibus would take only
at a discount of twenty cents. At breakfast
next morning they could hardly tell on what
country they had fallen. The waiters had but
a thin varnish of English speech upon their
native French, and they spoke their own tongue
with each other ; but most of the meats were
cooked to the English taste, and the whole was
a poor imitation of an American hotel. During
their stay the same commingling of usages and
races bewildered them ; the shops were English
and the clerks were commonly French ; the
carriage-drivers were often Irish, and up and
down the streets with their pious old-fashioned
names tinkled American horse -cars. Every-

244 Their Wedding Journey

where were churches and convents that recalled
the ecclesiastical and feudal origin of the city ;
the great tubular bridge, the superb water-front
with its long array of docks only surpassed by
those of Liverpool, the solid blocks of business
houses, and the substantial mansions on the
quieter streets, proclaimed 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 rooms of
the Young Men's Christian Association, or the
grain elevators, or the new park just tricked out
with rockwork and sprigs of evergreen, — not
to any of the charming resorts of our own cities,
but as in Europe to the churches, the churches
of a pitiless superstition, the churches with
their atrocious pictures and statues, their linger-
ing smell of the morning's incense, their con-
fessionals, their fee-taking sacristans, their wor-
shipers dropped here and there upon their

The Sentiment of Montreal

245

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
cathedral, pausing on
their way to alight and
walk through the Bon-
secours Market, where
the habitans have all
come in their carts, with
their various stores of
poultry, fruit, and vege-
tables, and where every
cart is a study. Here
is a simple-faced young
peasant - couple with
butter and eggs and
chickens ravishingly
displayed ; here is a
smooth-cheeked, black-
eyed, black-haired young

girl, looking as if an infusion of Indian blood
had darkened the red of her cheeks, presiding
over a stock of onions, potatoes, beets, and
turnips ; there an old woman with a face carven
like a walnut, behind a flattering array of cher-

Bonsecoitrs Market

246 Their Wedding Journey

ries and pears ; yonder a whole family traffick-
ing in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar
in many shapes of pious and grotesque device.
There are gay shows of bright scarfs and ker-
chiefs 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, while within the fine
edifice are the stalls of the butchers, and in the
basement below a world of household utensils,
glassware, hardware, 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 invoca-
tion of the saints attend the transaction of busi-
ness at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued
tone. The fat huckster-women drowsing be-
side their wares, scarce send their voices be-
yond 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 marble ; but our tourists enjoyed it as if
it had been St. Peter's ; in fact it has some-
thing of the barn-like immensity and impres-
siveness of St. Peter's. They did not ask it to

The Sentiment of Montreal 247

be beautiful or grand ; they desired it only
to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondly cher-
ished hideousness and incongruity of the aver-
age Catholic churches of their remembrance,
and it did this and more : it added an effect of
its own ; it offered the spectacle of a swarthy
old Indian kneeling before the high altar, tell-
ing his beads, and saying with many sighs and
tears the prayers which it cost so much martyr-
dom and heroism to teach his race. " Oh, it is
only a savage man," said the little French boy
who was showing them the place, impatient of
their interest at a thing so unworthy as this
groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly about from
object to object, rapidly lecturing their inatten-
tion. " It is now time to go up into the tower,"
said he, and they gladly made that toilsome
ascent, though it is doubtful if the ascent of
towers is not too much like the ascent of moun-
tains ever to be compensatory. From the top
of Notre Dame is certainly to be had a pros-
pect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves
and trembling muscles and troubled respira-
tion, the traveler might well look with delight,
and as it is must behold with wonder. So far
as the eye reaches it dwells only upon what
is magnificent. All the features of that land-
scape are grand. Below you spreads the city,
which has less that is merely mean in it than

Their Wedding Journey

any other city of our continent, and which is
everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices,
adorned by tasteful churches, and skirted by
full-foliaged avenues of mansions and villas.
Behind it rises the beautiful mountain, green
with woods and gardens to its crest, and flanked
on the east by an endless fertile plain, and on
the west by another expanse, through which the
Ottawa rushes, turbid and dark, to its conflu-
ence with the St. Lawrence. Then these two
mighty streams commingled flow past the city,
lighting up the vast champaign country to the
south, while upon the utmost southern verge,
as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits of
far-off mountains.

As our travelers gazed upon all this gran-
deur, their hearts were humbled to the tacit
admission that the colonial metropolis was not
only worthy of its seat, but had traits of a solid
prosperity not excelled by any of the abound-
ing and boastful cities of the Republic. Long
before they quitted Montreal 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

The Sentiment of Montreal 249

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
commonness, or where they rise above this have
a bourgeois commonness of face and manners,
and the English Canadians are to be known
from the many English sojourners by the ef-
fort to look much more English than the latter.
The social heart of the colony clings fast to
the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the
political tendency may be ; and the public mon-
uments and inscriptions celebrate this affec-
tionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deep-
ened by the epitaphs of those whose lives were
passed in the joint service of England and her
loyal child ; and our travelers, whatever their
want of sympathy with the sentiment, had to
own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud
reverence. Here, at least, was a people not cut
off from its past, but holding, unbroken in life
and death, the ties which exist for us only in
history. It gave a glamour of olden time to the
new land ; it touched the prosaic democratic
present with the waning poetic light of the aris-
tocratic and monarchical tradition. There was
here and there a title on the tablets, and there

250 Their Wedding Journey

was everywhere the formal language of loyalty
and of veneration for things we have tumbled
into the dust. It is a beautiful church, of ad-
mirable 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 pre-
cincts 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 archi-
tectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its
black-eyed peasant-girl telling her beads before
a side altar, just as in the enviably deplorable
countries we all love ; nor so much even as the
Irish cathedral which they next visited. That
is a very gorgeous cathedral indeed, painted
and gilded a merveilley 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 representing Christ's progress to Calvary ;
and there was a very tattered old man, — an old
man whose voice had been long ago drowned in
whiskey, and who now spoke in a ghostly whis-
per, — who, when he saw Basil's eye fall upon
the series, made him go the round of them, and
tediously explained them.

7 he Sentiment of Montreal 2 5 1

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

" Oh, it reminded me so sweetly of the swin-
dles of other lands and days, that I could n't help
it," he answered ; and straightway in the eyes
of both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterde-
malion stood transfigured to the glorious like-
ness of an Italian beggar.

They were always doing something of this
kind, those absurdly sentimental people, whom
yet I cannot find it in my heart to blame for
their folly, though I could name ever so many
reasons for rebuking it. Why, in fact, should
we wish to find America like Europe ? Are the
ruins and impostures and miseries and super-
stitions which beset the traveler abroad so pre-
cious, that he should desire to imagine them at
every step in his own hemisphere ? Or have we
then of our own no effective shapes of ignorance
and want and incredibility, that we must forever
seek an alien contrast to our native intelligence
and comfort ? Some such questions this guilty
couple put to each other, and then drove off to
visit the convent of the Gray Nuns with a joyful
expectation which I suppose the prospect of the
finest 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 pleasure in
their sad, pallid existence ?

252 Their Wedding Journey

The convent is at a good distance from the
Irish cathedral, and in going to it the tourists
made their driver carry them through one of the
few old French streets which still remain in
Montreal. Fires and improvements had made
havoc among the quaint houses since Basil's
first visit ; but at last they came upon a nar-
row, 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 ma-
dame the mother moving about her domestic
affairs, and spare monsieur the elderly husband
smoking beside the open window ; French ba-
bies crawled about the tidy floors ; French mar-
tyrs (let us believe Lalement or Brebeuf, who
gave up their heroic lives for the conversion of
Canada) lifted their eyes in high-colored litho-
graphs on the wall ; among the flower-pots in
the dormer-window 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
for infirm old people and for foundling children,

The Gray Artt

The Sentiment of Montreal 255

and it is now in the regular course of sight-see-
ing for the traveler to visit their hospital at
noonday, when he beholds the Sisters at their
devotions in the chapel. It is a bare, white-
walled, cold-looking chapel, with the usual para-
phernalia of pictures and crucifixes. Seated
upon low benches on either side of the aisle
were the curious or the devout ; the former in
greater number and chiefly Americans, who
were now and then whispered silent by an old
pauper zealous for the sanctity of the place. At
the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by
two, followed by the lady-superior with a 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 clat-
tered out of the chapel as they had clattered in,
with resounding shoes. The two young girls at
the head were very pretty, and all the pale faces
had a corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at
their pensive sameness, it seemed to him that
those prettiest girls might very well be the twain
that he had seen 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

256 Their Wedding Journey.

kneeling and rising now as then with the same
constrained and ordered movements. Would it
be too cruel if they were really the same per-
sons ? 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 of
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 convent, the unnatural care of
those alien little ones. Poor Soeurs Crises ! in
their narrow cells ; at the bedside of sickness
and age and sorrow ; kneeling with clasped
hands and yearning eyes before the bloody spec-
tacle of the cross ! — the power of your Church
is shown far more subtly and mightily in such
as you, than in her grandest fanes or the sight
of her most august ceremonies, with praying
priests, swinging censers, tapers and pictures
and images, under a gloomy heaven of cathedral
arches. There, indeed, the faithful have given
their substance ; but here the nun has given up
the most precious part of her woman's nature,

The Sentiment of Montreal 257

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 happiness, for health
and life. So I grieve for the earliest dead at
Plymouth more than for the multitude that the
plague swept away in London ; I shudder over
the crime of the first guilty man, the sin of the
first wicked woman in a new country ; the
trouble of the first youth or maiden crossed in
love there is intolerable. All should be hope
and freedom and prosperous life upon that vir-
gin soil. It never was so since Eden ; but none
the less I feel it ought to be ; and I am op-
pressed by the thought that among the earliest
walls which rose upon this broad meadow of
Montreal were those built to immure the inno-
cence of such young girls as these and shut them
from the life we find so fair. Would n't you
like to know who was the first that took the
veil in this wild new country ? Who was she,
poor soul, and what was her deep sorrow or

258 Their Wedding Journey

lofty rapture ? You can fancy her some Indian
maiden lured to the renunciation by the splendor
of symbols and promises seen vaguely through
the lingering mists of her native superstitions ;
or some weary soul, sick from the vanities and
vices, the bloodshed and the tears of the Old
World, and eager for a silence profounder than
that of the wilderness into which she had fled.
Well, the Church knows, and God. She was
dust long ago."

From time to time there had fallen little fitful
showers during the morning. Now as the wed-
ding-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."

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

"No," said Basil, not yet used to having his

The Sentiment of Montreal 259

decisions reached without his knowledge. " And
I don't see why we* should. Everybody goes
with one. You don't suppose we 're too heavy,
do you ? "

" I had a party from the States, ma'am, yes-
terday," interposed the driver; "two ladies, real
heavy ones, two gentlemen, weighin' two hun-
dred 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 horse 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 he
had a reasonable hope of being with us all day,
and has been so civil and obliging."

" Oh 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."

260 Their Wedding Journey

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

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

" Very well, then, Isabel, I '11 leave you at the
hotel."

In a moment it had come, the first serious
dispute of their wedded life. It had come as all
such calamities come, from nothing, and it was
on them in full disaster ere they knew. Such
a very little while ago, there in the convent gar-
den, their lives had been drawn closer in sym-
pathy than ever before ; and now that blessed
time seemed ages since, and they were further
asunder than those who have never been friends.
"I thought," bitterly mused Isabel, "that he
would have done anything for me." "Who
could have dreamed that a woman of her sense
would be so unreasonable," he wondered. Both
had tempers, as I know my dearest reader has
(if a lady), and neither would yield ; and so,
presently, they could hardly tell how, for they
were aghast at it all, Isabel was alone in her
room amidst the ruins of her life, and Basil alone
in the one-horse carriage, trying to drive away

The First Serious Dispute

The Sentiment of Montreal

263

Repenting

from the wreck of his happiness. All was over ;
the dream was past ; the charm was broken.
The sweetness of their love was turned to
gall ; whatever had pleased them in their loving
moods was loathsome now, and the things they
had praised a moment before were hateful. In
that baleful light, which seemed to dwell upon
all they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment,
how poor and stupid and empty looked their
wedding journey ! Basil spent five minutes in

264 Their Wedding Journey

arraigning his wife and convicting her of every
folly and 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 upbraid-
ings he found himself suddenly become her
ardent advocate, and ready to denounce her
judge as a heartless monster. " On our wed-
ding journey, too ! Good heavens, what an in-
credible 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 she seemed to find the most natural thing
that could be, and she met his surrender with
the openness of a heart that forgives but does
not forget, if indeed the most 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."

The Sentiment of Montreal 265

" I did n'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 did n'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 gayly out of the city.

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

" No, nobody could," said Isabel musingly,
and she added after a pause, " I wish you would
tell me just what you thought of me, dearest.
Did you feel as you did when our little affair
was broken off, long ago ? Did you hate me ? "

" I did, most cordially ; but not half so much
as I despised myself the next moment. As to
its being like a lover's quarrel, it was n't. It
was more bitter ; so much more love than lovers
ever give had to be taken back. Besides, it had
no dignity, and a lover's quarrel always has. A
lover's quarrel always springs from a more seri-
ous cause, and has an air of romantic tragedy.
This had no grace of the kind. It was a poor
shabby little squabble."

" Oh, don't call it so, Basil ! I should like you
to respect even a quarrel of ours more than

266 Their Wedding Journey

that. It was tragical enough with me, for I did
n't see how it could ever be made up. I knew /
could n'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 : whether 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 should have said it was totally out of char-
acter. It 's something you might have expected
of a very young bridal couple ; but after what
we 've been through, it seems too improbable."

"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
behave as if it had never been."

" Oh 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 grace-
ful mass beside them, and hid the city wholly
from sight. Peasant-villages, in the shade of

The Sentiment of Montreal 267

beautiful elms, dotted the plain in every direc-
tion, and at intervals crept up to the side of the
road along which they drove. But these had
been corrupted by a more ambitious architec-
ture 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 sheep's tails had
vanished from the portals. But our friends
were consoled by meeting numbers of the peas-
ants jolting home from market in the painted
carts which are doubtless of the pattern of the
carts first built there two hundred years ago.
They were grateful for the immortal old women,
crooked and brown with the labor of the fields,
who abounded in these vehicles ; when a huge
girl jumped from the tail of her cart, and showed
the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid,
they could only sigh out their unspeakable satis-
faction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low
cottages, through the open doors of which they
could see the exquisite neatness of the life
within. One of the doors opened into a school-
house, where they beheld with rapture the
schoolmistress, book in hand, and with a quaint

268

Their Wedding Journey

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, while they heard
only the soft whis-
per of the shower
without. There
was no one there
but themselves.
The urn of holy
water seemed not
to have been trou-
bled that day, and
no penitent knelt
at the shrine, be-
fore which twink-
led so faintly one
lighted lamp. The white roof swelled into dim
arches over their heads ; the pale day like a vis-
ible hush stole through the painted windows ;
they heard themselves breathe as they crept
from picture to picture.

A Slender Young Priest appeared

The Sentiment of Montreal 269

A narrow door opened at the side of the high
altar, and a slender young priest appeared in a
long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too,
as he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part
of the silence ; and when he approached with
dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed
courteously, it seemed impossible he should
speak. But he spoke, the pale young priest, the
dark-robed tradition, the tonsured vision of an
age and a church that are passing.

"Do you understand French, monsieur?"

" A very little, monsieur."

" A very little is more than my English," he
said, yet he politely went the round of the pic-
tures with them, and gave them the names of
the painters between his crossings at the differ-
ant altars. At the high altar there was a very
fair Crucifixion ; before this the priest bent one
knee. " Fine picture, fine altar, fine church,"
he said in English. At last they stopped near
the poor-box. As their coins clinked against
those within, he smiled serenely upon the good
heretics. Then he bowed, and, as if he had
relapsed into the past, he vanished through the
the narrow door by which he had entered.

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

" Oh, why did n't something happen ? "

"Ah, my dear! what could have been half

270 Their Wedding Journey

so good as the nothing that did happen ? Sup-
pose we knew him to have taken orders be-
cause of a disappointment in love : how com-
mon 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 dif-
ferent persons, and in wondering if the Cana-
dians 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 their mother country ?

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

The Sentiment of Montreal 271

had planned to do in Montreal. The booksell-
ers' windows 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 Lon-
don taste and garments of the London shape ;
here was the sign of a photographer to the
Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H. the Prince
of Wales ; a barber was " under the patronage of
H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E. the Duke
of Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal."
Ich dien was the motto of a restaurateur; a
hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade
with Honi soit qni mat y pense. Again they
noted the English solidity of the civic edifices,
and already they had observed in the foreign
population a difference from that at home.
They saw no German faces on the streets, and
the Irish faces had not that truculence which
they wear sometimes with us. They had not
lost their native simpleness and kindliness ;
the Irishmen who drove the public carriages
were as civil as our own Boston hackmen, and
behaved as respectfully under the shadow of
England here as they would have done under it
in Ireland. The problem which vexes us seems
to have been solved pleasantly enough in Can-
ada. Is it because the Celt cannot brook
equality ; and where he has not an established

272 Their Wedding Journey

and recognized caste above him, longs to tram-
ple on those about him ; and if he cannot 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 overweening loyalty placed a great
country like Canada in a very silly attitude, the
attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, cling-
ing to the maternal skirts, and though spoilt
and willful, without any character of his own.
The constant reference of local hopes to that
remote centre beyond seas, the test of success
by the criterions of a necessarily different civil-
ization, the social and intellectual dependence
implied by traits that meet the most hurried
glance in the Dominion, give an effect of mean-
ness to the whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life
of comfort, of peace, of irresponsibility they
live there, but it lacks the grandeur which no
sum of material prosperity can give ; it is
ignoble, like all voluntarily subordinate things.
Somehow, one feels that it has no basis in the
New World, and that till it has shaken loose
from England it cannot have.

It would be a pity, however, if it should be
parted from the parent country merely to be
joined to an unsympathetic half-brother like

The Sentiment of Montreal 273

ourselves, and nothing, fortunately, seems to be
further from the Canadian mind. There are
some experiments no longer possible to us
which could still be tried there to the advan-
tage of civilization, and we were better two
great nations side by side than a union of dis-
cordant traditions and ideas. But none the
less does the American traveler, swelling with
forgetfulness of the shabby despots who govern
New York, and the swindling railroad kings
whose word is law to the whole land, feel like
saying to the 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 it was to the colonial dependence of
Canada she owed the ability 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 smugglers, in which the fair contraband-
ists 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.

274 Their Wedding Journey

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
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 better at home, as were many kinds
of fine woolen goods. But laces, which you
could carry about you, were excellent ; and so
was any kind of silk. Could it be carried if
simply cut, and not made up ? There was a
difference about this : the friend of one lady
had taken home half a trunkful of cut silks ;
the friend of another had " run up the breadths "
of one lone little silk skirt, and then lost it by
the rapacity of the customs officers. It was
pretty much luck, and whether the officers hap-
pened to be in good-humor or not. You must
not try to take in anything out of season, how-
ever. 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 every-
thing 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

Shopping in Montreal

The Sentiment of Montreal 277

the combined knowledge of those miscreants.
Basil could not repress a shudder at the in-
nate 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 soci-
ety and the church, — smugglers to a woman,
and eager for any guilty subterfuge ! He
glanced at Isabel to see what effect the evil
conversation had upon her. Her eyes spark-
led ; her cheeks glowed ; all the woman was
on fire for smuggling. He sighed heavily and
went out with her to do the little shopping.

Shall I follow them upon their excursion ?
Shopping in Montreal is very much what it is
in Boston or New York, I imagine, except that
the clerks have a more honeyed sweetness of
manners towards the ladies of our nation, and
are surprisingly generous constructionists of
our revenue laws. Isabel had profited by every
word that she had heard in the ladies' parlor,
and she would not venture upon unsafe ground ;
but her tender eyes looked her unutterable
longing to believe in the charming possibilities
that the clerks suggested. She bemoaned her-
self before the corded silks, which there was no
time to have made up ; the piece velvets and
the linens smote her to the heart. But they
also stimulated her invention, and she bought

278 Their Wedding Journey

and bought of the made-up wares in real or fan-
cied needs, till Basil represented that neither
their purses nor their trunks could stand any
more. " Oh, don't be troubled about the trunks,
dearest," she cried, with that gayety which
nothing but shopping can kindle in a woman's
heart ; while he faltered on from counter to
counter, wondering at which he should finally
swoon from fatigue. At last, after she had
declared repeatedly, " There, now I am done,"
she briskly led the way back to the hotel to
pack up her purchases.

Basil parted with her at the door. He was a
man of high principle himself, and that scene
in the smugglers' den and his wife's prepara-
tion for trangression were revelations for which
nothing could have consoled him but a para-
gon 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 beau-
tiful to the very feet. Stately piles of architec-

The Sentiment of Montreal 279

ture, instead of the foul old tumble-down ware-
houses that dishonor the waterside in most
cities, rise from the broad wharves ; behind
these spring the twin towers of Notre Dame,
and the steeples of the other churches above
the city roofs.

" It 's noble, yes, it 's noble, after the best
that Europe can show," said Isabel, with enthu-
siasm ; " and what a pleasant day we 've had
here ! Does n't even our quarrel show couleur
de rose in this light ? "

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

" What do you mean, my dear ? "

"Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sun-
set on it, at the head of the street there."

The effect was so fine that Isabel could not
be angry with him for failing to heed what she
had said, and she mused a moment with him.

" It seems rather far-fetched," she said pres-
ently, "to erect a monument to Nelson in Mon-
treal, does n't it ? But then, it 's a very absurd
monument when you 're near it," she added
thoughtfully.

Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on
this Nelson column in Jacques Cartier Square,
his thoughts wandered away, not to the hero of
the Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navi-
gator, the first white man who ever set foot

28o

Their Wedding Journey

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 en-
circling 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, "with mustached lip and
bearded chin, with arquebuse and glittering
halberd, helmet, and cuirass," moved among
the plumed and painted savages ; then he lifted
Jacques Cartier's eyes, and looked out upon the
magnificent landscape. " East, west, and north,
the mantling forest was over all, and the broad
blue ribbon of the great river glistened amid

The Nelson Monument

The Sentiment of Montreal 281

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 hunt-
ers' birch canoes, and the watch-fires of both ;
and then in the sweet light of the spring morn-
ing, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon
the green meadows, 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 wilderness, 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
these scenes the beautiful inheritance of all
dreamers, and sketched the battles, the mir-
acles, the sufferings, and the penances through
which the pious colony was preserved and pros-

282 Their Wedding Journey

pered, 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 fulfill-
ment of a vow to do so if Villemarie were saved
from the freshet ; and then of Madame de la
Peltrie romantically receiving the sacrament
there, while all Villemarie fell down adoring !
Ah, that was a picturesque people ! When
did ever a Boston governor climb to the top of
Beacon hill in fulfillment of a vow"? To be
sure, we may yet see a New York governor
doing something of the kind — if he can find
a hill. But this ridiculous column to Nelson,
who never had anything to do with Montreal,"
he continued ; " it really seems to me the perfect
expression of snobbish colonial dependence and
sentimentality, seeking always to identify itself
with the mother country, and ignoring the local
past and its heroic figures. A column to Nel-
son in Jacques Cartier Square, on the ground
that was trodden by Champlain, and won for
its present masters by the death of Wolfe ! "

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec.
During supper they were served by French
waiters, who, without apparent English of their

The Sentiment of Montreal 283

own, miraculously understood that of the pas-
sengers, except in the case of the furious gen-
tleman who wanted English breakfast tea ; to
so much English as that their inspiration did
not reach, and they forced him to compromise
on coffee. It was a French boat, owned by a
French company, and seemed to be officered by
Frenchmen throughout ; certainly, as our tour-
ists in the joy of their good appetites affirmed,
the cook was of that culinarily delightful na-
tion.

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 Amer-
icans, with some French Canadians. The
former gathered on the forward promenade,
enjoying what little of the landscape the grow-
ing night left visible, and the latter made soci-
ety after their manner in the saloon. They
were plain-looking men and women, mostly,
and provincial, it was evident, to their inmost
hearts ; provincial in origin, provincial by
inheritance, by all their circumstances, social
and political. Their relation with France was
not a proud one, but it was not like submersion
by the slip-slop of English colonial loyalty ;
yet they seem to be troubled by no memories

284 Their Wedding Journey

of their hundred years' dominion of the land
that they rescued from the wilderness, and that
was wrested from them by war. It is a
strange fate for any people thus to have been
cut off from the parent country, and aban-
doned 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 wonder-
ful. 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
person of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic
who had shown her and Basil the pictures in
the country church. She was confessing to
the priest, and she was not at all surprised to
find that he was Basil in a suit of mediaeval
armor. He had an immense cross on his
shoulder.

"To get his cross to the top of the moun-
tain," 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."

The Sentiment of Montreal 285

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
seventeenth century."

QUEBEC

ISABEL hurried out upon the forward prom-
enade, where all the other passengers seemed to
be assembled, and beheld a vast bulk of gray
and purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up
from the mists of the river, and taking the
early morning light warm upon its face and
crown. Black-hulked, red-chimneyed Liverpool
steamers, gay river-craft, and ships of every sail
and 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 citadel on its crest flew the
red banner of Saint George, and along its brow
swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beau-
tiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire
and antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited,
modern world the vessel steamed up to this
city of an olden time and another ideal, — to
her who was a lady from the first, devout and
proud and strong, and who still, after two him-

Quebec

287

dred and fifty
years, keeps per-
fect 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 mediaeval
strangeness and
of beauty which
the name of no
other city could
intensify. AH oid street

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they
saw, swarming over a broad square, a market
beside which the Bonsecours Market would
have shown as common as the Quincy, and up
the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched an
aisle of carriages and those high swung ca-
lashes, which are to Quebec what the gondolas
are to Venice. But the hand of destiny was
upon our tourists, and they rode up town in an
omnibus. They were going to the dear old

288 Their Wedding Journey

Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which

Quebec is not to be thought of without a pang.
It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through
which they drove into the Upper Town, has
been demolished since the summer of last year.
Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road,
by those Quebec horses which expect to gallop
uphill, 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 pas-
sengers. 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, pro-
tected it against passing wheels. Why did not
some semi-forbidding commissary of police,
struggling hard to overcome his native polite-
ness, appear and demand their passports ?
The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it
needed but this touch. How often in the
adored Old World, which we so love and disap-
prove, had they driven in through such gates at
that morning hour ! On what perverse pretext,
then, was it not some ancient town of Nor-
mandy ?

" Put a few enterprising Americans in here,
and they 'd soon rattle this old wall down and
let in a little fresh air ! " said a patriotic voice

Quebec

289

at Isabel's elbow, and continued to find fault
with the narrow irregular streets, the huddling
gables, the quaint roofs, through which and
under which they drove on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square,
" Here is the French Cathedral ; there is the
Upper Town Market ; yonder are the Jesuit

The Lower Town

Barracks ! " cried Basil ; and they had a pass-
ing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side of
the square, and a low, massive yellow building
at the other, and, between the two, long ranks
of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands, pro-
tected by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas.
Then they dashed round the corner of a street,
and drew up before the hotel door. The low
ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy woodwork,

290 Their Wedding Journey

the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the
desired character of age, and its slovenly state
bestowed an additional charm. In another place
they might have demanded neatness, but in
Quebec they would almost have resented it.
By a chance they had the best room in the
house, but they held it only till certain people
who had engaged it by telegraph should arrive
in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool ;
and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty
was consolingly bad. The house was very full,
and the Ellisons (who had come on with them
from Montreal) were bestowed in less state, only
on like conditions.

The travelers all met at breakfast, which was
admirably cooked, and well served, with the
attendance of those swarms of flies which
infest Quebec, and especially infested the old
Musty House, in summer. It had, of course,
the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which
the traveler 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.

There were not many other Americans be-
sides themselves at this hotel, which seemed,
indeed, to be kept open to oblige such travelers
as had been there before, and could not per-

Quebec 291

suade themselves to try the new Hotel St.
Louis, whither the vastly greater number re-
sorted. 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 is so
tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy, 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 travelers who come on Saturday
and go on Monday, and few depart from it.
Our friends necessarily, therefore, drove first
to the citadel. It was raining one of those cold

292 Their Wedding Journey

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 Gib-
raltar in the world. They passed a heavy iron
gateway, and up through a winding lane of
masonry to the gate of the citadel, where they
were delivered into the care of Private Joseph
Drakes, who was to show them such parts of
the place as are open to curiosity. But a
citadel which has never stood a siege, or been
threatened by any danger more serious than
Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong, but
a dull piece of masonry to the civilian ; and our
tourists more rejoiced in the crumbling frag-
ment of the old French wall which the English
destroyed than in all they had built ; and they
valued the latter work chiefly for the glorious
prospects of the St. Lawrence and its mighty
valleys which it commanded. Advanced into
the centre of an amphitheatre inconceivably
vast, that enormous beak of rock overlooks the
narrow angle of the river, and then, in every
direction, immeasurable stretches of gardened
vale and wooded upland, till all melts into the
purple of the encircling mountains. Far and
near are lovely white villages nestling under

Quebec 293

elms, in the heart of fields and meadows ; and
everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided
farms stretch downward to the river-shores.
The best roads on the continent make this
beauty and richness accessible ; each little vil-
lage boasts some natural wonder in stream, or
lake, or cataract : and this landscape, magnifi-
cent beyond any in eastern America, is histori-
cal and interesting beyond all others. Hither
came Jacques Cartier three hundred and fifty
years ago, and wintered on the low point there
by the St. Charles ; here, nearly a century
after, but still fourteen years before the landing
at Plymouth, Champlain founded the missionary
city of Quebec ; round this rocky beak came
sailing the half-piratical armament of the Cal-
vinist 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 hero-
ism ; at the foot of this rock lay the fleet of
Sir William Phips, governor of Massachusetts,
and vainly assailed it in 1698 ; in 1759 came
Wolfe and embattled all the region, on river
and land, till at last the bravely defended city
fell into his dying hand on the Plains of Abra-
ham ; here Montgomery laid down his life at

294 Their Wedding Journey

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 com-
memorating Montgomery's death ; and then
showed them the 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 misdemeanors, from
an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dun-
drearily from his fresh English cheeks. There
was that immense difference between him and
the men in physical grandeur and beauty which
is so notable in the aristocratically ordered
military services of Europe, and which makes
the rank seem of another race from the file.
Private Drakes saluted his superior, and visibly
deteriorated in his presence, though his breast
was covered with medals, and he had fought
England's battles in every part of the world.
It was a gross injustice, the triumph of a thou-
sand 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

Quebec 295

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 about his
place. He looked inquiringly at Basil, as if he
might be a gentleman with a horse to be taken
care of and a place to be worked about, and
made him regret that he was not a man of sub-
stance enough to provide for Private Drakes
and Mrs. Drakes and the brood of Ducklings,
who had been shown to him stowed away in
one of those cavernous rooms in the earthworks
where the married soldiers have their quarters.
His regret enriched the reward of Private
Drakes' service, — which perhaps answered
one of Private Drakes' purposes, if not his chief
aim. He promised to come to the States upon
the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking
from her own large experience, declared that
everybody got on there; and he bade our
friends an affectionate farewell as they drove
away to the Plains of Abraham.

The fashionable suburban cottages and places
of Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading
northward to the old battle-ground and beyond
it ; but these face chiefly towards the rivers St.
Lawrence and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and
shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion
from the highway ; so that the visitor may un-
interruptedly meditate whatever emotion he

296

Their Wedding Journey

will for the scene of Wolfe's death as he rides
along. His loftiest emotion will want the noble
height of that heroic soul, who must always
stand forth in history a figure of beautiful and
singular distinction, admirable alike for the
sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness,

and the martial ardor
that mingled in him
and taxed his feeble
frame with tasks
greater than it could
bear. The whole
story of the capture
of Quebec is full of
romantic splendor
and pathos. Her fall
was a triumph for all
the English - speak-
ing 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 with-
out pity of the hopes extinguished and the
labors brought to naught in her overthrow.
That strange colony of priests and soldiers,
of martyrs and heroes, of which she was the
capital, willing to perish for an allegiance to

The Wolfe Monument

Quebec 297

which the mother country was indifferent, and
fighting against the armies with which Eng-
land was prepared to outnumber the whole
Canadian population, is a magnificent spec-
tacle ; and Montcalm laying down his life to
lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe
dying to win her. The heart opens towards the
soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly vic-
tory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard,"
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 sur-
render of Quebec."

In this city for which they perished their
fame has never been divided. The English
have shown themselves very generous victors ;
perhaps nothing could be alleged against them,
but that they were victors. A shaft common to
Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in
the Governor's Garden ; and in the Chapel of
the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where
Montcalm died, by the same conquerors who
raised to Wolfe's memory the column on the
battlefield.

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

298 TJieir Wedding Journey

than the rest of the field ; the friendly hollow
'that sheltered him from the fire of the French
dwarfs his monument ; yet it is sufficient, and
the simple inscription, " Here died Wolfe victo-
rious," gives it a dignity which many cubits of
added stature could not bestow. Another of
those bitter showers, which had interspersed
the morning's sunshine, drove suddenly across
the open plain, and our tourists comfortably
sentimentalized the scene behind the 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 cur-
tain.

Do I pitch the pipe too low ? We poor hon-
est 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 reade'r's respected acquaintance. But again,
I forbid myself in a higher interest ; and I am
afraid that even if I were less virtuous, I could
not exalt their mood upon a battlefield ; for of
all things of the past a battle is the least con-
ceivable. I have heard men who fought in
many battles say that the recollection was like
a dream to them ; and what can the merely civil-

Quebec 299

ian 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 slain, for whom tender hearts
away yonder over the sea were to ache and
break ? Did the wretches that fell wounded
stretch themselves here, and writhe beneath
the feet of friend and foe, or crawl away for
shelter into little hollows, and behind bushes
and fallen trees ! Did he, whose soul was so
full of noble and sublime impulses, die here,
shot through like some ravening beast ? The
loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din
of arms, the cries of victory, — I vainly strive
to conjure up some image of it all now; and
God be thanked, horrible spectre ! that, fill the
world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still re-
mainest incredible in its moments of sanity and
peace. Least credible art thou on the old bat-
tlefields, 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,

300 Their Wedding Journey

and the words on the monument, " Here died
Wolfe victorious," did not proclaim his bloody
triumph over the French, but his self-conquest,
his victory over fear and pain and love of life.
Alas ! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world
honor those who renounce self in the joy of
their kind, equally with those who devote them-
selves through the anguish and loss of thou-
sands ? So old a world, and groping still !

The tourists were better fitted for the next
occasion of sentiment, which was at the Hotel
Dieu, whither they went after returning from
the battlefield. It took all the mal-address of
which travelers are masters to secure admit-
tance, 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 sympathetic spectators doing in-
effectual services, that they at last found the
proper entrance, and were answered in English
that the porter would ask if they might see the
chapel. They hoped to find there the skull of
Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who per-
ished long ago for the conversion of a race that
has perished, and whose relics they had come,
fresh from their reading of Parkman, with some
vague and patronizing intention to revere. An
elderly sister with a pale, kind face led them
through a ward of the hospital into the chapel,

Quebec 301

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 Pere Brebeuf ! " sighed the gen-
tle sister, with the tone and manner of having
lost him yesterday ; " we had it down only last
week, showing it to some Jesuit fathers ; but
it's in the convent now, and isn't to be seen."
And there mingled apparently in her regret for
Pere Brebeuf a confusing sense of his actual
state as a portable piece of furniture. She
would not let them praise the chapel. It was
very clean, yes, but there was nothing to see in
it. She deprecated their compliments with
many shrugs, but she was pleased ; for when
we renounce the pomps and vanities of this
world, we are pretty sure to find them in some
other — if we are women. She, good and pure
soul, whose whole life was given to self-denying
toil, 'had yet something angelically coquettish
in her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was
the clarified likeness of this-worldliness. Oh,
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 com-
parison 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

302 Their Wedding Journey

were not many patients, but here and there a
wan or fevered face looked at them from its pil-
low, or a weak form drooped beside a bed, or a
group of convalescents softly talked together.
They came presently to the last hall, at the end
of which sat another nun, beside a window that
gave a view of the busy port, and beyond it the
landscape of village-lit plain and forest-darkened
height. On a table at her elbow stood a rose-
tree, on which hung only two pale tea-roses, so
fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wonder
and praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun,
to whom there had been some sort of presenta-
tion, gathered one of the roses, and with a shy
grace offered it to Isabel, who shrank back a
little as from too costly a gift. "Take it," said
the first nun, with her pretty French accent ;
while the other, who spoke no English at all,
beamed a placid smile ; and Isabel took it. The
flower, lying light in her palm, exhaled a delicate
odor, and a thrill of exquisite compassion for it
trembled through her heart, as if it had been
the white, cloistered life of the silent nun : with
its pallid loveliness, it was as a flower that had
taken the veil. It could never have uttered the
burning passion of a lover for his mistress ; the
nightingale could have found no thorn on it to
press his aching poet's heart against ; but sick
and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it ; at

Quebec

303

Giving the Rose

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
Hdtel 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

304 Their Wedding Journey

the outside." 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, coquettish little smile, and then the mute,
blank life of the nun resumed her.

From Hotel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but
a step ; both were in the same street ; but our
friends fancied themselves to have come an
immense distance when they sat down at an
early dinner, amidst the clash of crockery and
cutlery and looked round upon all the profane
traveling world assembled. Their regard pres-
ently fixed upon one company which monopo-
lized a whole table, and were defined from the
other diners by peculiarities as marked as
those of the Soeurs Crises themselves. There
were only two men among some eight or ten
women ; one of the former had a bad amiable
face, with eyes full of merry deviltry ; the other,
clean-shaven, and dark, was demure and silent
as a priest. The ladies were . of various types,
but of one effect, with large rolling eyes, and
faces that somehow regarded the beholder as
from a distance, and with an impartial feeling
for him as for an element of publicity. One

Quebec

3°5

of them, who caressed a lapdog with one hand
while she served herself with the other, was, as
she seemed to believe, a blond ; she had pale
blue eyes, and her hair was cut in front so as
to cover her forehead with a straggling sandy-
colored fringe. She had an English look, and

The Lively Company

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 jeweled with a kind of
broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary

306 Their Wedding Journey

style of society what scene-painting is to paint
ing, and might have borne close inspection 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 of violated
convention, of something Gil Bias-like, almost
picaresque.

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 then appearing in Quebec for one week
only.

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

"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 ' Pygmalion/ at Mon-
trehal," answered the British blonde of Amer-
ican birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the
erring // of her sister.

Quebec 307

"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
Wenus."

"Yes, you know," demanded the first speaker
aoo 's to do Wenus ? "

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

There was one 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 too 'eavy for Wenus ! " came from dif-
ferent lively critics ; and the debate threatened
to become too intimate for the public ear, when
one of their gentlemen came in and said,
" Charley don't seem so well this afternoon."
On this the chorus changed its note, and at the
proposal, " Poor Charley, let 's go and cheer
'im hup a bit," the whole good-tempered com-
pany trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the
afternoon to that sort of aimless wandering to
and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign
city unawares, and best develops its charm of
strangeness. So they went out and took their
fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long
fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharp-
ened by Montreal, and impartially rejoiced in
the crooked up-and-down hill streets ; the thor-
oughly French domestic architecture of a place

308 Their Wedding Journey

that thus denied having been English for a hun-
dred years ; the porte-cocheres beside every
house ; the French names upon the doors, and
the oddity of the bell-pulls ; the rough-paved,
rattling streets ; the shining roofs of tin, and
the universal dormer-windows ; the littleness of
the private houses, and the greatness of the
high-walled and garden-girdled convents ; 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 children tumbled about over the pyramids
of shot and shell ; the sloping market-place
before the cathedral, where yet some remnant
of the morning's traffic lingered under canvas
canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquet of
marigolds and asters of an old woman, peasant
enough to have sold it in any market-place of
Europe ; the small, dark shops beyond the
quarter invaded by English retail trade ; the
movement of all the strange figures of cleric
and lay and military life ; the sound of a foreign
speech prevailing over the English ; the en-
counter of other tourists, the passage back and
forth through the different city gates ; the
public wooden stairways, dropping flight after
flight from the Upper to the Lower Town ; the

Quebec 309

bustle of the port, with its commerce and ship-
ping and seafaring life huddled close in under
the hill ; the many desolate streets of the Lower
Town, as black and ruinous as the last great
fire left them ; and the marshy meadows
beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of
Cartier and Montcalm.

They went to the chapel of the Seminary at
Laval University, and admired the Le Brim,
and the other paintings of less merit, but equal
interest through their suggestion of a whole
dim, religious world of paintings ; and then
they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so
much in looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck
which is there, as in reveling amid the familiar
rococo splendors of the temple. Every swag-
gering statue of a saint, every rope-dancing
angel, every cherub of those that on the carven
and gilded clouds above the high altar float —

" Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders," —

was precious to them ; the sacristan dusting the
sacred properties with a feather brush, and giv-
ing 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 who stepped in for a half-hour's
devotion, and for the men with bourgeois or
peasant faces, who stole a moment from affairs

3io

Their Wedding Journey

and crops, and gave it to the saints. There
was nothing in the place that need remind
them of America, and its taste was exactly that
of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth
century. They could easily have believed
themselves in the farthest Catholic South but
for the two great porcelain stoves that stood on
either side of the nave near the entrance, and
that too vividly reminded them of the possibil-
ity of cold.

In fact, Que-
bec is a little
painful in this
and other con-
fusions of the
South and North,
and one never
quite reconciles
himself to them.
The Frenchmen,
who expected to
find there the
. climate of their
native land, and
ripen her wines
in as kindly a
sun, have perpetuated the image of home in so
many things, that it goes to the heart with a
painful emotion to find the sad, oblique light of

A Quaint Street

Quebec

the North upon them. As you ponder some
characteristic aspect of Quebec, — a bit of street
with heavy stone houses, opening upon a stretch
of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising
slim against it, — you
say, to your satisfied
soul, " Yes, it is the
real thing ! " and then
all at once a sense
of that Northern sky
strikes in upon you,
and makes the reality
a mere picture. The
sky is blue, the sun is
often fiercely hot ; you
could not perhaps
prove that the pa-
thetic 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 travelers thought, upon
the little circular garden near Durham Terrace,
where every brightness of fall flowers abounded
— marigold, cockscomb, snapdragon, dahlia,
hollyhock, and sunflower. It was a substantial

Near Durham Terrace

312 Their Wedding Journey

and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied that
fainter-hearted plants would have pined away
in that garden, where the little fountain, leap-
ing up into the joyless light, fell back again
with a musical shiver. The consciousness of
this latent cold of winter, only held in abeyance
by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the
once magnificent, now neglected, Governor's
Garden, where there was actually a rawness in
the late afternoon air, and whither they were
strolling for the view from its height, and to
pay their duty to the obelisk raised there to
the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm.
The sounding Latin inscription celebrates the
royal 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-
ited praise. It enforced again the idea of a
kind of posthumous friendship between Wolfe
and Montcalm, which gives their memory its
rare distinction, and unites them, who fell in
fight against each other, as closely as if they
had 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 capital in the European sense, with all
the advantages of a small vice-regal court, and

Quebec 3J3

its social and political intrigues, in the French
times. Under the English, for a hundred years
it was the centre of Colonial civilization and
refinement, with a governor-general's residence
and a brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to
which the large garrison of former days gave
gayety and romance. The honors of a capital,
first shared with Montreal and Toronto, now
rest with 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 nursemaids. But
in the days of old there were scenes of carnival
pleasure in the Governor's Garden, and there
the garrison band still plays once a week, when
it is filled by the fashion and beauty of Quebec,
and some semblance of the past is recalled. It
is otherwise a lonesome, indifferently tended
place, and on this afternoon there was no one
there but a few loafing young fellows of low
degree, French and English, and children that
played screaming from seat to seat and path to
path and over the too-heavily shaded grass. In
spite of a conspicuous warning that any dog
entering the garden would be destroyed, the
place was thronged with dogs unmolested and
apparently in no danger of the threatened doom.
The seal of a disagreeable desolation was given

314 Their Wedding Journey

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 cler-
ical force, and was attended by an uncommonly
devout congregation. With Europe constantly
in their minds, they were bewildered to find
the worshipers 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 education in large degree among
the men, and there was in all a pious attention
to the function in poetical keeping with the
origin and history of a city which the zeal of
the Church had founded.

A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced
coat and bearing a silver staff, bowed to them
when they entered, and, leading them to a pew,
punched up a kneeling peasant, who mutely
resumed his prayers in the aisle outside, while
they took his place. It appeared to Isabel very
unjust that their curiosity should displace his
religion ; but she consoled herself by making

Quebec

3*5

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 no-
table as those of Que-
bec ; and then they fol-
lowed the orderly crowd
of worshipers out, and
left the cathedral to the
sacristan and the odor
of incense.

They thought the type
of French - Canadian
better here than at Mon-
treal, 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 pro-
vincial gentility, the poorest wore garments that
were clean and whole. Everybody, too, was
going to have a hot Sunday dinner, if there was

A n Old Gateway

316 Their Wedding Journey

any truth in the odors that steamed out of every
door and window ; and this dinner was to be
abundantly garnished with onions, for the dull-
est nose could not err concerning that savor.

Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that
showed itself superior to every distinction of
race, were strolling vaguely, and not always
quite happily about ; but they made no impres-
sion on the proper local character, and the air
throughout the morning was full of the senti-
ment of Sunday in a Catholic city. There was
the apparently meaningless jangling of bells,
with profound hushes between, and then more
jubilant jangling, and then deeper silence;
there was the devout trooping of the crowds to
the churches ; and there was the beginning of
the long afternoon's lounging and amusement
with which the people of that faith reward their
morning's devotion. Little stands for the sale
of knotty apples and choke-cherries and cakes
and cider sprang magically 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

Quebec 317

the tongues of the lively folk and made them
taciturn as we of a graver race. They have
kept the ancestral vivacity of manner ; the ele-
gance 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 North-
ern sun. It is not America ; if it is not France,
what is it ?

Of the many beautiful things to see in the
neighborhood of Quebec, our wedding-journey-
ers were in doubt on which to bestow their one
precious afternoon. Should it be Lorette, with
its cataract and its remnant of bleached and
fading Hurons ; or the Isle of Orleans, with its
fertile farms and its primitive peasant life ; or
Montmorenci, with the unrivaled fall and the
long drive through the beautiful village of
Beauport ? Isabel chose the last, because Basil
had been there before, and it had to it the
poetry of the wasted years in which she did not
know him. She had possessed herself of the
journal of his early travels, among the other
portions and parcels recoverable from the dread-
ful past, and from time to time on this journey
she had read him passages out of it, with min-
gled sentiment and irony, and, whether she was

318 Their Wedding Journey

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 a field. Yet it
had touches of nature and reality, and Basil
could not utterly despise himself for having
written it. " Yes," he said, "life was then a
thing to be put into pretty periods ; now it 's
something that has risks and averages, and may
be insured."

There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his
tone, that made her sigh, " Ah ! if I 'd only had
a little more money, you might have devoted
yourself to literature ; " for she was a true Bos-
tonian in her honor of our poor craft.

"'Oh, 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 words 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

Quebec 319

his seat and facing round, while he pointed
with his whip towards Quebec, " that 's what we
call the Silver City."

They looked back with him at the city, whose
thousands of tinned roofs, rising one above the
the other from the water's edge to the citadel,
were all a splendor of argent light in the after-
noon 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 mor-
row that never came ! To be forever within
one day of the end of a wedding journey that
never ended ! "

From far down the river by which they rode
came the sound of a cannon, breaking the Sab-
bath repose of the air. "That 's the gun of
the Liverpool steamer, just coming in," said
the driver.

" Oh," cried Isabel, " I 'm thankful we 're only
to stay one night more, for now we shall be
turned out of our nice room by those people
who telegraphed for it ! "

There is a continuous village along the St.
Lawrence from Quebec, almost to Montmo-
renci ; and they met crowds of villagers com-

320

Their Wedding Journey

ing from the church as they passed through
Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at the
change that had befallen them. They had their
Sunday's best on, and the women, instead of
wearing the peasant costume in which he had

The Village Street

first seen them, were now dressed as if out of
" Harper's Bazar " of the year before. He anx-
iously asked the driver if the broad straw hats
and the bright sacks and kirtles were no more.
" Oh, you 'd see them on week days, 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

Quebec 321

for every virtue, — for thrift, for sobriety, for
neatness, for amiability ; and his words ought
to have had the greater weight, because he was
of the Irish race, between which and the Cana-
dians there is no kindness lost. But the looks
of the passers-by corroborated him, and as for
the little houses, open-doored beside the way,
with the pleasant faces at window and portal,
they were miracles of picturesqueness 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 lines, 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 poul-
try about the barns; I dare be sworn there is
always a small girl driving a flock of decorous
ducks down the middle of the street ; and of.
the priest with a book under his arm, passing
a wayside shrine, what possible doubt ? The
houses, which are of one model, are built by
the peasants themselves with the stone which
their land yields more abundantly than any
other crop, and are furnished with galleries and
balconies to catch every ray of the fleeting sum-
mer, and perhaps to remember the long-lost

322 Their Wedding Journey.

ancestral summers of Normandy. At every
moment, in passing through this ideally neat
and pretty village, our tourists must think of
the lovely poem of which all French Canada
seems but a reminiscence and illustration. It
was Grand Pre, not Beauport; and they paid
an eager homage to the beautiful genius which
has touched those simple village aspects with
an undying charm, and which, whatever the
land's political allegiance, is there perpetual
Seigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad inter-
vale of the St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you
draw near "the Falls of Montmorenci, and pres-
ently 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 tra-
gedy of Montmorenci.

Once a suspension bridge, built sorely against
the will of the neighboring habitam, hung from
these towers high over the long plunge of the
cataract. But one morning of the fatal spring
after the first winter's frost had tried the hold
of the cable on the rocks, an old peasant and
his wife with their little grandson set out in
their cart to pass the bridge. As they drew
near the middle the anchoring wires suddenly

Quebec 323

lost their grip upon the shore, and whirled into
the air; the bridge crashed under the hapless
passengers and they were launched from its
height upon the verge of the fall and thence
plunged, two hundred and fifty feet, into the
ruin of the abyss.

The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood
upon low stone piers, so far up the river from
the cataract that whoever fell from it would yet
have many a chance for life ; and it would have
been perilous to offer to replace the fallen
structure, which, in the belief of faithful Chris-
tians, clearly belonged to the numerous bridges
built by the Devil, in times when the Devil did
not call himself a civil engineer.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the
sad tale as he halted his horses on the bridge ;
and as his passengers looked down the rock-
fretted brown torrent towards the fall, Isabel
seized the occasion to shudder that ever she
had set foot on that suspension 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 instinc-
tive 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

324 TJieir Wedding Journey

noisily before them with cries in their sole
English, " This way, sir ! " 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
commanding point was sufficiently chasmal and
precipitous. The lofty bluff was scooped
inward from the St. Lawrence in a vast irreg-
ular semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one
within another, sinking far into its sides, and
naked from foot to crest, or meagrely wooded
here and there with evergreen. From the
central brink of these gloomy purple chasms
the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a
cloud, —

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

I say a cloud, because I find it already said to
my hand, as it were, in a pretty verse, and
because I must needs liken Montmorenci to
something that is soft and light.- Yet a cloud
does not represent the glinting of the water in
its downward swoop ; it is like some broad slope
of sun-smitten snow ; but snow is coldly white
and opaque, and this has a creamy warmth in its
luminous mass ; and so, there hangs the cataract
unsaid as before. It is a mystery that anything

Montm or end

Quebec 327

so grand should be so lovely, that anything so
tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet be
so large that one glance fails to » comprehend it
all. The rugged wildness of the cliffs and hol-
lows 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 separate 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 vision with its exquisite color and
form. Being wiser than I, they did not try to
utter its loveliness ; they were content to feel
it, and the perfection of the afternoon, whose
low sun slanting over the landscape gave, under
that pale, greenish blue sky, a pensive sentiment
of autumn to the world. The crickets cried
amongst the grass ; the hesitating chirp of
birds came from the tree overhead ; a shaggy
colt left off grazing in the field and stalked up
to stare at them ; their little guides, having
found that these people had no pleasure in the
sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a
precipice, threw themselves also down upon the

328 Their Wedding Journey

grass and crooned a long, long ballad in a
mournful minor key about some maiden whose
name was, La Belle Adeline. It was a moment
of unmixed enjoyment for every sense, and
through all their being they were glad ; which
considering, they ceased to be so, with a deep
sigh, as one reasoning that he dreams must pres-
ently awake. They never could have an emo-
tion without desiring to analyze it ; but perhaps
their rapture would have ceased as swiftly, even
if they had not tried to make it a fact of con-
sciousness.

" If there were not dinner after such experi-
ences 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 care-
ful. Don't work it too hard. The human
brain, you know — delicate organ."

"Well, you understand what I mean ; and I
think it 's one of the great charms of a husband,
that you 're not forced to express yourself to

Quebec 329

him. A husband," continued Isabel senten-
tiously, poising a bit of meringue between her
thumb and finger, — for they had reached that
point in the repast, — "a husband is almost as
good as another woman ! "

In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and
exchanged the history of the day with them.

" Certainly," said Mrs. Ellison, at the end,
" it 's been a pleasant day enough, but what of
the night ? You 've been turned out, too, by
those people who came on the steamer, and who
might as well have stayed on board 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
husband, and cried in tones of reproach, " Rich-
ard, 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 some-
thing palatial at the end. It 's his joking
way."

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

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

33°

Their Wedding Journey

" O Richard," cried his wife, in despair of his
amendment, "you wouldn't make life a burden
to a mouse ! " And having nothing else for it,
she laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.
"Well, Fanny," the Colonel irrelevantly
answered, "put on your
hat and things, and let 's
all go up to Durham Ter-
race for a promenade. I
know our friends want
to go. It 's something
worth seeing ; and by the
time we get back, the
clerk will have us a per-
fectly sumptuous apart-
ment."

Nothing, I think, more
enforces the illusion of
Southern Europe in Que-
bec than the Sunday-night promenading on
Durham Terrace. This is the ample space on
the brow of the cliff to the left of the cita-
del, the noblest and most commanding position
in the whole city, which was formerly occupied
by the old castle of St. Louis, where dwelt the
brave Count Frontenac and his splendid suc-
cessors 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

On Durham Terrace

Quebec 33 r

a public promenade. A stately arcade of solid
masonry supports it on the brink of the rock,
and an iron parapet incloses it ; there are a few
seats to lounge upon, and some idle old guns
for the children to clamber over and play with.
A soft twilight had followed the day, and there
was just enough obscurity to hide from a willing
eye the Northern and New World facts of the
scene, and to bring into more romantic relief
the citadel dark against the mellow evening,
and the people gossiping from window to window
across the narrow streets of the Lower Town.
The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and
there was a constant coming and going of the
promenaders, who each formally paced back and
forth upon the planking for a certain time, and
then went quietly home, giving place to the
new arrivals. They were nearly all French,
and they were not generally, it seemed, of the
first fashion, but rather of middling condition
in life ; the English being represented only by
a few young fellows and now and then a red-
faced old gentleman with an Indian scarf trail-
ing from his hat. There were some fair Amer-
ican costumes and faces in the crowd, but it
was essentially Quebeckian. The young girls
walking in pairs, or with their lovers, had the
true touch of provincial unstylishness, the
young men the ineffectual excess of the second-

33 2 Their Wedding Journey

rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich inele-
gance of a bourgeoisie in their best. A few
better-figured avocats or notaircs (their pro-
fession was as unmistakable as if they had car-
ried 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 indulged private prefer-
ences in shapes and colors. One of the prom-
enaders was in white, even to his canvas shoes ;
another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared
in perfect purple. It had a strange, almost
portentous effect when these two startling fig-
ures met as friends and joined each other in
the promenade with linked arms ; but the even-
ing was already beginning to darken round them,
and presently the purple comrade was merely a
sombre shadow beside the glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished ;
but the river defined itself by the varicolored
lights of the ships and steamers that lay, dark,
motionless bulks, upon its broad breast ; the
lights of Point Levis swarmed upon the other
shore ; the Lower Town, two hundred feet
below them, stretched an alluring mystery of
clustering roofs and lamplit windows and dark
and shining streets around the mighty rock,

Quebec 333

mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle pecul-
iarly Northern and characteristic of Quebec
revealed itself ; a long arch brightened over the
northern horizon ; the tremulous flames of the
aurora, pallid violet or faintly tinged with crim-
son, shot upward from it, and played with a
weird apparition and evanescence to the zenith.
While the strangers looked, a gun boomed from
the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the
bugle sprang out upon the silence.

Then they all said, " How perfectly in keep-
ing everything has been ! " and sauntered back
to the hotel.

The Colonel went into the office to give the
clerk another turn on the rack, and make him
confess to a hidden apartment somewhere, while
Isabel left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the
parlor, and invited Miss Kitty to look at her
coop in the fifth story. As they approached,
light and music and laughter stole out of an
open door next hers, and Isabel, distinguishing
the voices of the theatrical party, divined that
this was the sick-chamber, and that they were
again cheering up the afflicted member of the
troupe. Some one was heard to say, "Well,
'ow do you feel now, Charley ?" and a sound of
subdued swearing responded, followed by more
laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a
snatch of song, and a stir of feet and dresses
as for departure.

334 Their Wedding Journey

The two listeners shrank together; as wo-
men they could not enjoy these proofs of the
jolly camaraderie existing among the people of
the troupe. They trembled as before the merri-
ment of as many light-hearted, careless, good-
natured young men ; it was no harm, but it was
dismaying; and, "Dear!" cried Isabel, "what
shall we do ? "

"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 strate-
gist, was making show of a desperation more
violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally
forced into the attitude of moderating his fury.

"Well, Fanny, that 's all he can do for us ;
and I do think it 's the most outrageous thing
in the world ! It 's real mean ! "

Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own
denunciatory manner, but just then she was
obliged to answer Isabel's eager inquiry
whether they had got a room yet. "Yes a
room," she said, " with two beds. But what are
we to do with one room ? That 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) — " seems to think
the matter perfectly settled."

"You see, Mrs. March," added the Colonel,

Quebec 335

" he 's able to bully us in this way because he
has the architecture on his side. There is n't
another room in the house."

" Let me think a moment," said Isabel, not
thinking an instant. She had taken a fancy to
at least two of these people from the first, and
in the last hour they had all become very well
acquainted ; now she said, " I '11 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 fe-
males 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 did n't commit myself, did I, Fanny ? —
I am sometimes hospitable to excess, Mrs.
March," he said, to explain his aside. 'And,
now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and
the gratitude of the houseless stranger will fol-
low you."

The whole party explored both rooms, and
the ladies decided to keep Isabel's. The Colo-
nel 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 be-
fore the gentlemen returned, but the ladies hap-

336 Their Wedding Journey

pily 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 in-
valid actor lay, and where lately there had been
minstrelsy and apparently dancing for his sol-
ace, 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 con-
ceal her first yawn, when the gentlemen, odor-
ous of cigars, returned to say good-night.

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

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

" Good-night."

The two men walked off together ; but in a
minute afterwards they had returned and were
knocking tremulously at the closed door.

"Oh, what has happened?" chorused the la-
dies in woeful tune, seeing a certain wildness
in the faces that confronted them.

"We don't know!" answered the others in
as fearful a key, and related how they had found
the door of their room ajar, and a bright light
streaming into the corridor. They did not stop

T/u' Mermaid

Quebec 339

to ponder this fact, but, tirith the heedlessness
of their sex, pushed the door wide open, when
they saw seated before the mirror a bewilder-
ing figure, with disheveled locks wandering
down the back, and in dishabille expressive of
being quite at home there, which turned upon
them a pair of pale blue eyes, under a forehead
remarkable for the straggling fringe of hair
that covered it. They professed to have re-
mained 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 com-
mand of his wife, with many protests and in-
sincere delays amid which the curiosity of his
hearers alone prevented them from rending
him in pieces.

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

" Well, 7 think it was a mermaid."

"A" mermaid!" said his wife scornfully.
" How do you know ? "

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

"Well," said Mrs. Ellison, " it was no mer-
maid, it was a mistake ; and I 'm going to see
about it. Will you go with me, Richard ?"

34° Their Wedding Journey

" No money could induce me ! If it 's a mis-
take, it is n't proper for me to go ; if it 's a
mermaid, it 's dangerous."

" Oh 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, claiming the invaded chamber. The
foe replied with like civility, saying the clerk
had given her that room with the understanding
that another lady was to be put there with her,
and she had left the door unlocked to admit
her. The watchers with the sick man next
door appeared and confirmed this speech ; a
feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to it.

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

"Then it 's the clerk's fault," said Mrs. Elli-
son, glad to retreat unharmed ; and she made
her husband ring for the guilty wretch, a pale,
quiet young Frenchman, whom the united
party, sallying into the corridor, began to up-
braid in one breath, the lady in dishabille van-
ishing as often as she remembered it, and
reappearing whenever some strong point of
argument or denunciation occurred to her.

Quebec 34 *

The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his
wicked tribe, threw himself upon their mercy
and confessed everything : the house was so
crowded, and he had been so crazed by the de-
mands upon him, that he had understood Colo-
nel 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 con-
sented without difficulty, and the rest dispers-
ing, 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
travelers, to be occupied by ladies of the troupe ;
their doors successively opened, and she was
heard explaining to each as she passed. The
momentary displeasure which she had shown
at her banishment was over. She detailed the
facts with perfect good-nature, and though the
others appeared no more than herself to find
any humorous cast in the affair, they received
her narration with the same amiability. They
uttered their sympathy seriously, and each
parted from her with some friendly word.
Then all was still.

" Richard," said Mrs.Ellison, when in Isabel's

342 Their Wedding Journey

room the travelers 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 alone. I wish you 'd come part of the way
with us, 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 thun-
der as of bureaus and wash stands rolled against
the door. " The ladies are fortifying their posi-
tion," said the Colonel to Basil, and the two re-
turned to their own chamber. " I don't wish
any intrusions," he said, instantly shutting him-
self in ; " my nerves are too much shaken now.
What an awfully mysterious old place this Que-
bec is, Mr. March ! I '11 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 fa-
mous 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

Quebec 343

flung wide the door, and then stood motionless
before it, dumbly staring at a figure on the
threshold, — a figure with the fringed forehead
and pale blue eyes of her whom they had so
lately turned out of that room,

Shrinking behind the side of the doorway,
"Excuse me, gentlemen," she said, with a dig-
nity that recalled their scattered senses, " but
will you 'ave the goodness to look if my beads
are on your table ? Oh, 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 cul-
pable ; 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 time silent. Basil put out
the light. " Oh, I 'm sorry you did that, my dear
fellow," said the Colonel; "but never mind, it

344 Their Wedding Journey

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 table-cloths ;
and I thought I 'd like to look. It seems to me
that I make out a checkered pattern on top and
a flowered or arabesque pattern underneath.
I wish they had given me mates. It 's pretty
hard having to sleep between odd table-cloths.
I shall complain to the landlord of this in the
morning. I 've never had to sleep between odd
table-cloths at any hotel before."

The Colonel's voice seemed scarcely to have
died away upon Basil's drowsy ear, when sud-
denly the sounds of music and laughter from
the invalid's room startled him wide awake.
The sick man's watchers were coquetting with
some one who stood in the little courtyard five
stories below. A certain breadth of repartee
was naturally allowable at that distance ; the
lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and
the ladies mocked him with the same freedom,
now and then totally neglecting him while they
sang a snatch of song to the twanging of the
guitar, or talked professional gossip, and then
returning to him with some tormenting expres-
sion of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to
Basil ; yet he could recollect few things in-
tended for his pleasure that had given him more

Quebec 345

satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out
into the moonlight 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 fascinating in the life of
the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and
who are never so unreal as in their own charac-
ters. In their shabby bestowal in those mean
upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry
submission to the errors and caprices of destiny,
their mutual kindliness and careless friendship,
these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-
footed burlesque seemed to be playing rather
than living the life of strolling players ; and
their love-making was the last touch of a com-
edy that Basil could hardly accept as reality, it
was so much more like something seen upon
the stage. He would not have detracted any-
thing from the commonness and cheapness of
the mise en scene, for that, he reflected drowsily
and confusedly, helped to give it an air of fact
and make it like an episode of fiction. But
above all, he was pleased with the natural
eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was
in perfect agreement with his taste ; and just

346 Their Wedding Journey

as his reveries began to lose shape in dreams,
he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact
that all this could have happened to him in our
commonplace time and hemisphere. " Why,"
he thought, " if I were a student in Alcala, what
better could I have asked ? " And as at last
his soul swung out from its moorings and lapsed
down the broad slowly circling tides out in the
sea of sleep, he was conscious of one subtile
touch of compassion for those poor strollers, —
a pity so delicate and fine and tender that it
hardly seemed his own, but rather a sense of the
compassion that pities the whole world.

HOMEWARD AND HOME

THE travelers all met at breakfast and duly
discussed the adventures of the night ; and for
the rest, the forenoon passed rapidly and slowly
with Basil and Isabel, as regret to leave Quebec,
or the natural impatience of travelers to be off,
overcame them. Isabel spent part of it in
shopping, for she had found some small sums
of money and certain odd corners in her trunks
still unappropriated, and the handsome stores
on the Rue Fabrique were very tempting. She
said she would just go in and look ; and the
wise reader imagines the result. As she knelt
over her boxes, trying so to distribute her pur-
chases 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.

" Basil," she said, " perhaps we 'd better de-
clare some of 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."

348

Their Wedding Journey

A Question of Duty

"C'estadire—?"

"As much as they cost."

" Oh, then, dearest," responded Isabel indig-
nantly, " it can t be wrong to smuggle ! I won't
declare a thread ! "

"That 's very well for you, whom they won't
ask. But what if they ask me whether there 's
anything to declare ? "

Isabel looked at her husband and hesitated.

Homeivard and Home 349

Then she replied in terms that I am proud to
record in honor of American womanhood :
" You must n't fib about it, Basil " (heroically) ;
" I could n'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 per-
fectly. They also had done a little shopping in
Quebec, and they meant to do more at Mon-
treal before they returned to the States. Mrs.
Ellison was disposed to look upon Isabel's
compunctions as a kind of treason to the sex,
to be 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 time," said Isabel. " Mr. March
has to be home by a certain day ; and we shall
just get back in season." Then she made them
promise to spend a day with her in Boston, and
the Colonel coming to say that he had a car-
riage at the door for their excursion 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

Their Wedding Journey

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
has n't any of your little languid airs and affec-
tations. I don't know but I 'm a bit disap-
pointed 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 Ter-
race where they leaned long upon the iron
parapet and blest themselves with the beauty
of the prospect. A tender haze hung upon the
landscape and subdued it till the scene was as
a dream before them. As in a dream the river
lay, and 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

Homeward and Home 351

roofs of the Lower Town twinkled in the morn-
ing sun ; around them on every hand, on that
Monday forenoon when the States were stir-
ring from ocean to ocean in feverish industry,
drowsed the gray city within her walls ; from
the flagstaff of the citadel hung the red banner
of St. 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 sum-
mer is !

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, cham-
bermaids, and porters of the hotel. The young
fellow with the bad 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 troupe's
checked. There were forty pieces,

35 2 Their Wedding Journey

and it always remained a mystery, considering
the small amount of clothing necessary to those
people on the stage, what could have filled their
trunks. The young man and the two English
blondes of American birth found places in the
same car with our tourists, and enlivened the
journey with their frolics. When the young
man pretended to fall asleep, they wrapped his
golden curly head in a shawl, and vexed him
with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a
brief truce with a handful of almonds ; and the
ladies having no other way to eat them, one of
them saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked
them hammerwise with the heel. It was all so
pleasant that it ought to have been all right ;
and in their merry world of outlawry perhaps
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 watch the gambols of the players, till they
came to the river St. Francis, whose wandering
loveliness the road follows through an infinite
series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and finds
everywhere glassing in its smooth current the
elms and willows of its gentle shores. At one
place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids,
there was a huge sawmill, covering the stream
with logs and refuse, and the banks with whole

Homeri.vard and Home

353

cities of lumber; which also they accepted as
no mean elements of the picturesque. They
clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant
life they were leaving. When some French

The Grecian Portico

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 wrapped in
a broad leaf of the squash-vine, or pop-corn in

354 Their Wedding Journey.

its native tissue-paper, and advertising the new
Dollar Store in Portland ? " They saw the
quaintness vanish from the farmhouses ; first
the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep
roof, then the steep roof itself. By and by they
came to a store with a Grecian portico and four
square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked
no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage
at Island Pond took place at nine o'clock, with-
out costing them a cent of duty or a pang of
conscience. At that charming station the
trunks are piled higgledy-piggledy into a room
beside the track, where a few inspectors with
stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the pas-
sengers. There are no porters to arrange the
baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out
his box, and opens it before the lordly inspector,
who stirs up its contents with an unpleasant
hand and passes it. He makes you feel that
you are once more in the land of official inso-
lence, and that, whatever you are collectively,
you are nothing personally. Isabel, who had
sent her husband upon this business with quak-
ing meekness of heart, experienced the bold in-
dignation of virtue at his account of the way
people were made their own baggage-smashers,
and would not be amused when he painted the
vile terrors of each husband as he tremblingly
unlocked his wife's store of contraband.

Homeward and Home

355

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 breakfast-
less they hurried
aboard the Boston
train on the East-
ern Road, and all
along that line
(which is built to
show how uninter-
esting the earth
can be when she
is ennuyee of both
sea and land), Ba-
sil's life became a
struggle to con-
struct a meal from
the fragmentary opportunities of twenty differ-
ent 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 desert 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 drought and heat, which they had briefly

Nearing Home

356 Their Wedding Journey

escaped during their sojourn in Canada, brooded
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 fan-
cied that they almost heard the grasshoppers
sing above the rattle of the train. When they
reached Boston at last, they were dustier than
most of us would like to be a hundred years
hence. The whole city was equally dusty ; and
they found the trees in the square before their
own door gray with dust. The bit of Virginia
creeper planted under the window hung shriv-
eled 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. " Oh, you
dears ! " the good soul cried, " you don't know
how anxious I 've been about you ; so many
accidents happening all the time. I Ve never
read the 'Evening Transcript' till the next
morning, for fear I should find your names
among the killed and wounded."

" Oh, aunty, you 're too good, always ! " whim-
pered 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 col-
ored their sentiment of return faded now in the

Home Again

Homeward and Home 359

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 both enthusiastic at hav-
ing 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 hav-
ing 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, bewil-
dered him. He longed for some familiar 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 effusion, and wrung his hand, smil-
ing 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,

360 Their Wedding Jomney

to-morrow, for a week," he said. "By the
way, you look as if you needed a little change.
Are n't you going anywhere this summer ? "

"So you see, my dear/' observed Basil, when
he had recounted the fact to Isabel at tea, " our
travels are incommunicably our own. We had
best say nothing about our little jaunt to other
people, and they won't know we 've been gone.
Even if we tried we could n't make our wedding
journey theirs."

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

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

LIFE had not used them ill in this time, and
the fairish treatment they had received was not
wholly unmerited. The twelve years past had
made them older, as the years must in passing.
Basil was now forty-two, and his mustache 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 mus-
tache distinguished. He had grown stouter ;
he filled his double-breasted frock coat com-
pactly, 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 manipulation from the young lady in
the shop would induce them to go on. But

362 Their Wedding Journey

this did not matter much now, for he seldom
wore gloves at all. He was glad that the
fashion suffered him to spare in that direction,
for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully
after the out-goes. The insurance business
was not what it had been, and though Basil had
comfortably established himself in it, he had
not made money. He sometimes thought that
he might have done quite as well if he had gone
into literature ; but it was now too late. They
had not a very large family : they had a boy of
eleven, who "took after" his father, and a girl
of nine, who took after the boy; but with the
American feeling that their children must have
the best of everything, they made it an expen-
sive family, and they spent nearly all Basil
earned.

The narrowness of their means, as well as
their household cares, had kept them from tak-
ing many long journeys. They passed their
winters in Boston, and their summers on the
South Shore, — cheaper than the North Shore,
and near enough for Basil to go up and down
every day for business ; but they promised
themselves that some day they would revisit
certain points on their wedding journey, and
perhaps somewhere find their lost second-youth
on the track. It was not that they cared to be
young, but they wished the children to see them

Niagara Revisited 363

as they used to be when they thought them-
selves 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 as sincerely and solidly blue as if
it had been chromoed. They felt that they
were really looking up into the roof of the
world, when they glanced at it ; but when an
old gentleman hastily kissed a young woman,
and commended her to the conductor as being
one who was going all the way to San Francisco
alone, and then risked his life by stepping off
the moving train, the vastness of the great
American fact began to affect Isabel disagree-
ably. " Is n't it too big, Basil?" she pleaded,
peering timidly out of the little municipal con-
sciousness 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 elec-
trical; her apprehensions had multiplied quite
beyond the ratio of the dangers that beset her ;
and Basil had counted upon a tonic effect of the
change the journey would make in their daily
lives. She looked ruefully out of the window
at the familiar suburbs whisking out of sight,
and the continental immensity that advanced

364 Their Wedding Journey

devouringly upon her. But 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 demand
for lunch helped her to forget her anxieties ;
they began to be hungry as soon as the train
started. She found that she had not put up
sandwiches enough ; and when she told Basil
that he would have to get out somewhere and
buy some cold chicken, he asked her what in
the world had become of that whole ham she
had had boiled. It seemed to him, he said, that
there was enough of it to subsist -them to Niag-
ara and back ; and he went on as some men do,
while Somerville vanished, and even Tufts Col-
lege, which" assails the Bostonian vision 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 jour-
ney, if nothing else remarkable happened to im-
press it upon them. Indeed, they were so much
concerned in it that they began to ask when
they should come to this tunnel, even before
they began to ask for lunch ; and the long time
before they reached it was not perceptibly

Niagara Revisited

365

Beginning the Second Journey

shortened by Tom's quarter-hourly consulta-
tions of his father's watch.

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that
their fellow-passengers were so interesting as
their fellow-passengers used to be in their
former days of travel. They were soberly
dressed, and were all of a middle-aged sobriety
of deportment, from which nothing salient of-
fered itself for conjecture or speculation ; and
there was little within the car to take their
minds from the brilliant young world that

366 Their Wedding Journey

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 under-
brush, and overflowing the tops, and stealing
down the hollows, of the railroad embankments ;
a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink.
Its shy, wild beauty ceased whenever the train
stopped, but the orioles made up for its absence
with their singing in the village trees about the
stations ; and though Fitchburg and Ayer's
Junction and Athol are not names that invoke
historical or romantic associations, the hearts of
Basil and Isabel began to stir with the joy of
travel before they had passed these points. At
the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken
which had been commanded, and he recognized
in the keeper of the railroad restaurant their
former conductor, who had been warned by the
spirits never to travel without a flower of some
sort carried between his lips, and who had pre-
served his own life and the lives of his passen-
gers for many years by this simple device. His
presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie
and baked beans a supernatural interest, and

Niagara Revisited 367

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 children the secret of their elixir.
To be sure, it was only a genre poetry, but it
was such as has always inspired English art
and song ; and now the whole family enjoyed,
as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith or
Wordsworth, the flying sentiment of the rail-
road 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 unri-
valed value till they came to a superannuated
car on a siding in the woods, in which the rail-
road 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 sym-
pathetic spectators. Basil had lately been read-

368 Their Wedding Journey

ing 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 rail-
road car.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open
on either hand, with smooth stretches of the
quiet river, and breadths of grassy intervale
and tableland ; the elms grouped themselves
like the trees of a park ; here and there the
nearer hills broke away, and revealed long,
deep, chasmed hollows, full of golden light and
delicious shadow. There were people rowing
on the water ; and every pretty town had some
touch of picturesqueness or pastoral charm to
offer : at Greenfield, there were children play-
ing in the new-mown hay along the railroad em-
bankment ; 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 ham-
mock, in her door-yard, and on an old gentle-
man hoeing his potatoes ; a group of girls waved
their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a
boy paused in weeding a garden-bed, — and prob-
ably denied that he had paused, later. In the
mean time the golden haze along the mountain

Niagara Revisited 369

side changed to a clear, pearly lustre, and the
quiet evening possessed the quiet landscape.
They confessed to each other that it was all as
sweet and beautiful as it used to be ; and in
fact they had seen palaces, in other days, which
did not give them the pleasure they found in a
woodcutter's shanty, losing itself among the
shadows in a solitude of the hills. The tunnel,
after this, was a gross and material sensation ;
but they joined the children in trying to hold
and keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his
watch. " Now," said Tom, when five minutes
were gone, "we are under the very centre of
the mountain." But the tunnel was like all
accomplished facts, all hopes fulfilled, valueless
to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the
sense ; and the children emerged at North
Adams with but a mean opinion of that great
feat of engineering. Basil drew a pretty moral
from their experience. " If you rode upon a
comet you would be disappointed. Take my
advice, and never ride upon a comet. I should n't
object to your riding on a little meteor, — you
would n't expect much of that ; but I warn you
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 en-

37° Their Wedding Journey

couraged, 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 inter-
minable levels of Western New York over
which the train was running. The longing to
come to an edge, somewhere, that the New
England traveler experiences on this plain, was
inarticulate with the children ; but it breathed
in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed even
the architectural inequalities of a city into
which they drew in the early morning. This
city showed to their weary eyes a noble stretch
of river, from the waters of which lofty piles of
buildings rose abruptly ; and Isabel, being left
to guess where they were, could think of no
other place so picturesque as Rochester.

"Yes," said her husband; "it is our own En-
chanted City. I wonder if that unstinted hos-
pitality 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 be-
come 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

Niagara Revisited

371

kindness in hotel clerks ; or perhaps I have be-
come of a more impressive presence ; they cer-
tainly 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 ex-
panded 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 loss ; the fore-
finger 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 breakfast at Rochester ; they will give us
broiled whitefish ; and we can show the children
where Sam Patch jumped over Genesee Falls,
and" —

"No, no, Basil," cried his wife. "It would
be sacrilege ! All that is sacred to those dear

The Same Clerk

37 2 Their Wedding Journey

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 ! "

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

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

When they reached a place where the land
mated its level with the level of the lake, they
ran into a wilderness of railroad cars, in a world
where life seemed to be operated solely by loco-
motives and their helpless minions. The bel-
lowing and bleating trains were arriving in
every direction, not only along the ground floor

Niagara Revisited 373

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 Cam-
pagna. 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 prefer-
ence. It was what Isabel had said twelve years
before, on first beholding the lake.

But they did not really see the lake till they
hacl 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 affec-
tionate devotion of a black waiter. There was
already a ridiculous abundance and variety on
the table ; but this waiter brought them straw-
berries and again strawberries, and repeated
plates of griddle cakes with maple syrup ; and
he hung over the back of first one chair and

374 Their Wedding Journey

then another with an unselfish joy in the appe-
tites of the breakfasters which gave Basil re-
newed hopes of his race. " Such rapture in
serving argues a largeness of nature which will
be recognized hereafter," he said, feeling about
in his waistcoat pocket for a quarter. It seemed
a pity to render the waiter's zeal retroactively
interested, but in the view of the fact that he
possibly expected the quarter, there was no-
thing 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, wereVt
there?" asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfac-
tion in the disaster. The porter seemed humil-
iated ; he confessed 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

Niagara Revisited 375

moment they entered the train and began to
run out of the city between the river and the
canal. He attempted a diversion with the canal-
boats, and tried to bring forward the subject of
Rudder Grange in that connection. They said
that the canal-boats were splendid, but they
were looking for the Rapids now ; and they de-
clined 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, they valued the Rapids very little
more than the Hoosac Tunnel, when they came
in sight of them, at last ; and Basil had some
question in his own mind whether the Rapids
had not dwindled since his former visit. He
did not breathe this doubt to Isabel, however,
and she arrived at the Falls with unabated ex-
pectations. They were going to spend only

376 Their Wedding Journey

half a day there ; and they turned into the sta-
tion, away from the phalanx of omnibuses,
when they dismounted from their train. They
seemed, as before, to be the only passengers
who had arrived, and they found an abundant
choice of carriages waiting in the street, outside
the station. The Niagara hackman may once
have been a predatory and very rampant animal,
but public opinion, long expressed through the
public prints, has reduced him to silence and
meekness. Apparently, he may not so much
as beckon with his whip to the arriving way-
farer ; it is certain that he cannot cross the
pavement to the station door ; and Basil, invit-
ing one of them to negotiation, was himself re-
quired by the attendant policeman to step out
to the curbstone, and complete his transaction
there. It was an impressive illustration of the
power of a free press, but upon the whole Basil
found the effect melancholy ; it had the sadden-
ing 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 familiar as if they had breathed it all

Niagara Revisited

377

their childhood. It was full now of the fra-
grance of some sort of wild blossom ; and again
they had that old, entrancing sense of the
mingled awfulness and loveliness of the great
spectacle. This sylvan perfume, the gayety of
the sunshine, the mildness of the breeze that

The Parapet

stirred the leaves overhead, and the bird-singing
that made itself heard amid the roar of the
Rapids and the solemn incessant plunge of the
cataract, moved their hearts, and made them
children with the boy and girl, who stood rapt
for a moment and then broke into joyful won-
der. They could sympathize with the ardor
with which Tom longed to tempt fate at the

Their Wedding Journey

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 sui-
cidal 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 offensive array of blue and green and
yellow glasses on the shore, through which you
were expected to look at the Falls gratis,
They missed the simple dignity of the blanch-
ing 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,
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

Niagara Revisited 379

photographed in a bridal group, and took ref-
uge 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 com-
pany 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 tram-
way, and now you cannot without feeling that
you have failed to get your money's worth. It
was in this illogical spirit of economy that Basil
invited his family to the descent ; but Isabel
shook her head. " No, you go with the chil-
dren," she said, "and I will stay here till you
get back;" her agonized countenance added,
"and pray for you;" and Basil took his chil-
dren on either side of him, and rumbled down
the terrible descent with much of the excite-
ment that attends travel in an open horse-car.
When he stepped out of the car he felt that in-
crease of courage which comes to every man
after safely passing through danger. He re-
solved to brave the mists and slippery stones at
the foot of the Fall ; and he would have plunged
at once into this fresh peril if he had not been
prevented by the Prospect Park Company.
This ingenious association has built a large

380 Their Wedding Journey

tunnel-like shed quite to the water's edge, so
that you cannot view the cataract as you once
could, at a reasonable remoteness, but must
emerge from the building into a storm of spray.
The roof of the tunnel is painted with a lively
effect in 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 confidentially admitted
that there was no fun in that, anyway ; and in
the mean time he equipped him and his chil-
dren for their foray into the mist. When they
issued forth, under their friend's leadership, Basil
felt that, with his children clinging to each
hand, he looked like some sort of animal with
its young, and, though not unsocial by nature,
he was glad to be among strangers for the time.
They climbed hither and thither over the rocks,
and lifted their streaming faces for the views
which the guide pointed out ; and in a rift
of the spray they really caught one glorious
glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The
next instant the spray swirled back, and they

Niagara Revisited 381

were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow,
lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and
naturally as if that had been the habit of rain-
bows 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 pro-
prietor 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 an-
noyance 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 sym-
pathy for the sake of sparing her needless pain.

.382 Their Wedding Journey

He met her at the top of the inclined tram-
way with a face of exemplary unconsciousness,
and he listened with her to the tale their coach-
man told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking
out on the Rapids, of a Frenchman and his
wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morn-
ing, 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 circum-
stances, that every one condoled with the wid-
ower ; 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 ar-
rested. A flash of conviction illumed the whole
fact to Basil's guilty consciousness : this un-
happy Frenchman 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 ex-
cess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at the
very first act of spendthrift profusion she com-
mitted. The guide pointed out the rock in the

Niagara Revisited 383

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 hus-
band Isabel's bonnet ribbons seemed to flutter
from the pointed reef. He could endure the
pretty arbor no longer. " Come, children ! "
he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety ; " let us
go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the
Three Sisters, that your mother 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 pre-
tension ; and his simulated hilarity only in-
creased upon paying a toll of two dollars at the
Goat Island bridge.

" What extortion ! " cried Isabel, with an in-
dignation that secretly unnerved him. He
trembled upon the verge of confession ; but he
had finally the moral force to resist. He suf-
fered her to compute the cost of their stay at
Niagara without allowing those three dollars to
enter into her calculation ; he even began to
think what justificative extravagance he could
tempt her to. He suggested the purchase of
local bricabrac ; he asked her if she would
not like to dine at the International, for old
times' sake. But she answered, with disheart-

384 Their Wedding Jotirney

ening virtue, that they must not think of such
a thing, after what they had spent already.
Nothing, perhaps, marked the confirmed hus-
band in Basil more than these hidden fears and
reluctances.

In the mean time Isabel ignorantly aban-
doned herself to the charm of the place, which
she found unimpaired in spite of the re-
ported ravages of improvement about Niagara.
Goat Island was still the sylvan solitude of
twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer
nymphs and dryads than of old. The air was
full of the perfume that scented it at Prospect
Park ; the leaves showered them with shade
and sun, as they drove along. " If it were not
for the children here," she said, " I should think
that our first drive on Goat Island had never
ended."

She sighed a little, and Basil leaned for-
ward and took her hand in his. " It never
has ended ; it 's the same drive ; only we are
younger now, and enjoy it more." It always
touched him when Isabel was sentimental about
the past, for the years had tended to make her
rather more seriously maternal towards him
than towards the other children ; and he recog-
nized that these fond reminiscences were the
expression of the girlhood still lurking deep
within her heart.

Niagara Revisited 385

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 prob-
ably of considerable interest to himself, and a
man looks back at his own boyhood with some
pathos. But in his actuality a boy has very
little to commend him to the toleration of other
human beings. Tom was very well, as boys
go ; but now his contribution to the common
enjoyment was to venture as near as possible
to all perilous edges ; to throw stones into the
water, and to make as if to throw them over
precipices on the people below ; to pepper his
father with questions, and to collect cumbrous
mementos of the vegetable and mineral king-
doms. He kept the carnage waiting a good
five minutes, while he could cut his initials on a
hand-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
sometimes they encountered a couple making a
tour of the island on foot. But none of these
people were young, and Basil reported that the
Three Sisters were inhabited only by persons

386

Their Wedding Journey.

Cutting his Initials

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 superb novelty which nature has

Niagara Revisited 387

lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in that
place at the edge of the great Horse - Shoe
where the rock has fallen and left a peculiarly
shaped chasm : through this the spray leaps up
from below, and flashes a hundred feet into the
air, in rocket-like jets and points and then
breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic
curves of a perpetual Fourth of July. Basil
said something like this in celebrating the dis-
play, with the purpose of rendering her loss
more poignant ; but she replied, with tranquil
piety, that she would rather keep her Niagara
unchanged ; and she declared that, as she un-
derstood him, there must be something rather
cheap and conscious in the new feature. She
approved, however, of the change that had re-
moved 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 hack-
neyed ; and they were glad to part from him
a little sooner than they had bargained to do.

388 Their Wedding Journey

They strolled about the anomalous village on
foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of
travel and the enormity of the local preparation.
Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world
so large ! Could there ever have been visitors
enough at Niagara to fill them ? They were
built so big for some good reason, no doubt;
but it was no more apparent than why all these
magnificent equipages are waiting about the
empty streets for the people who never come
to hire them.

" It seems to me that I don't see so many
strangers here as I used," Basil had suggested
to their driver.

" Oh, they have n't commenced coming yet,"
he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pre-
tended 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 misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve
him, and he contended that Niagara was as
prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In
fact, they observed that their regret for the
supposed decline of the Falls as a summer re-
sort was nowhere popular in the village, and
they desisted in their offers of sympathy, after
their rebuff from the restaurateur.

Niagara Revisited

389

Basil got his family away to the station after
dinner, and left them there, while he walked
down the village street, for a closer inspection
of the hotels. At the door of the largest a
pair of children sported in the solitude, as fear-

Out of Season

lessly 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 inactiv-
ity behind the register ; some deserted ladies
flitted through the door of the parlor at the
side. He recalled the evening of his former

39° Their Wedding Journey

visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons
in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect,
a scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for
consolation into the barber's shop, where he
found himself the only customer, and no busy
sound of " Next " greeted his ear. But the
barber, like all the rest, said that Niagara was
not unusually empty ; and he came out feeling
bewildered and defrauded. Surely the agent
of the boats which descend the Rapids of the
St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil went to
him and pretended that he was going to buy a
ticket. But a glance at the agent's sign showed
Basil that the agent, with his brave jollity of
manner and his impressive " GW</-morning,"
had passed away from the deceits of travel, and
that he was now inherited by his widow, who
in turn was absent, and temporarily represented
by their son. The boy, in supplying Basil with
an advertisement of the line, made a specious
show of haste, as if there were a long queue of
tourists waiting behind him to be served with
tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a spectral
line there, but Basil was the only tourist present
in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation,
and fled with the advertisement in his 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 ? "

Niagara Revisited

39 1

" Where are the brides ? "

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

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

392 Their Wedding Journey

"Yes," she desolately asserted, "that is so!
Something has been hanging over me ever
since we came, and suddenly I realized that it
was the absence of the brides. 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 in-
to the nearest seat.

" Perhaps," said Basil, dreamily regarding the
contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased
paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecast-
ing in his remoter mind the probable conse-
quences, "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 dare say there
were middle-aged people at Niagara when we
were here before, but we did not meet them,
nor they us. I dare say 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 ho-
tel clerks and the restaurateurs and the hack-
men know them, and that is the reason why
they receive with surprise and even offense our
sympathy for their loneliness. Do you suppose,

Niagara Revisited 393

Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my
shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do any-
thing to bring us en rapport with that lost
bridal world again ? "

Isabel caught away her hand. " Basil," she
cried, "it would be disgusting! I wouldn'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 ? "

" I don't know," said Basil. " You are cer-
tainly a little wrinkled, my dear."

" And you are very fat, Basil."

They glanced at each other with a flash of re-
sentment, 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

394 Their Wedding Journey

of despair. " Oh, what shall I do ? Now we
shall not have a wink of sleep with them to-
night. Where is that mix?" She hunted for
the medicine in her bag, and the children sub-
mitted ; for they had eaten all the cherries, and
they took their medicine without a murmur.
" I wonder at your letting them eat the sour
things, Basil," said their mother, when the chil-
dren 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. Dorit let them get anything else to eat,
dearest."

" They are safe ; they have no more money.
They are frugally confining themselves to the
admiration of the Japanese bows and arrows
yonder. Why have our Indians taken to making
Japanese bows and arrows ?"

Isabel despised the small pleasantry. " Then
you saw nobody at the hotel ? " she asked.

"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

Niagara Revisited 395

after, and seeing how old they 've grown. I
don't think I could bear to see Kitty Ellison
again. I'm glad she didn't come to visit us
in Boston, though, after what happened, she
could n't, poor thing! I wonder if she's ever
regretted her breaking with him in the way she
did. It 's a very painful thing to think of, —
such an inconclusive conclusion ; it always
seemed as if they ought to meet again, some-
where."

"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."

" 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,"
answered Isabel thoughtfully ; " he might have

396 Their Wedding Journey

chosen not to introduce her because he felt too
proud of her to subject her to any possible mis-
appreciation 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 ? " Isabel repeated, absently. " Oh, a
woman does n't judge a man by what he does,
but by what he is ! I knew that if she dismissed
him it was because she never really had trusted
or could trust his love ; and I thought she had
better not make another trial."

" 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 pain-
fully. 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 ;

Niagara Revisited 397

it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and
Basil had broken each other's hearts and parted,
would not the fragments of their lives have
been on a much finer, much higher plane ?
Had not the commonplace, every-day experi-
ences 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 convulsively through his,
and pulled him away.

" 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 watch-
ing 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

398 Their Wedding Journey

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 indigna-
tion at his stupidity that she neglected to insist
upon his stopping the train, which was rapidly
diminishing in the perspective.

He declared it was only a fancied resem-
blance ; 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 chil-
dren to his side. On the left hand, far up the
river, the great Fall shows, with its mists at its
foot and its rainbow on its brow, as silent and
still as if it were vastly painted there ; and be-
low 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 chil-
dren. " Isabel, you must see this ! "

Niagara Revisited

399

Isabel had been preparing for the passage of
this bridge ever since she left Boston. " Never ! "
she exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes,
and hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanks
to this precaution of hers, the train crossed the
bridge in perfect safety.

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

This book is due on the last DATE stamped below

rail 5 /d

PS2025.T5 1894a

3 2106 00207 2475

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Full text of "Their wedding journey. With illus. by Clifford Carleton"

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