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BREEN'S PRACTICE, i2mo, $1.50; paper, 50 cents. A SEA CHANGE; OR, LOVE'S STOWAWAY. A Lyricated Farce. i6mo, $1.00. THE SLEEPING CAR, AND OTHER FARCES, izmo, Ji.oo. THE ELEVATOR. 32100, 50 cents. THE SLEEPING CAR. 32mo, 50 cents. THE PARLOR CAR. 32010, 50 cents. THE REGISTER. 32010, 50 cents. THREE VILLAGES. i8mo, $1.25. POEMS. New Revised Edition. 12010, parchment covered boards, $2.00. A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT. A Comedy. i8mo,$i.25. OUT OF THE QUESTION. A Comedy. 18010,51.25. CHplCE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES. Edited, and with Critical and Biographical Essays, by Mr. HOWELLS. 8 vols. i8mo, each, $1.00. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, BOSTON AND NEW YORK. THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY W. D. HOWELLS AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOURNEYS " ETC., ETC. ILLUSTRATED BY AUGUSTUS HOPPIN BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY rejis, Cambri&0e 1897 Copyright, 1871 and 1888, BY W. D. HOWELLS. All rights reserved. CONTENTS. i. THE OUTSET 1 n. A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM 35 m. THE NIGHT BOAT 66 IV. A DAY'S RAILROADING ........ 80 V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND 97 YI. NIAGARA 119 vn. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE 172 VIII. THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL . . . . . . 195 LX. QUEBEC 228 2068026 IV CONTENTS. X. HOMEWARD AND HOME 279 XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY 288 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. THE OUTSET. THEY first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where they afterwards saw each other ; whither, indeed, he followed her ; and there the match was also broken off. Why it was broken off, and why it was renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long love-story, which I do not think myself qual- ified to rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a sustained or involved narration ; though I am persuaded that a skillful romancer could turn the courtship of Basil and Isabel March to excellent account. Fortunately for me, however, in attempt- 2 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. ing to tell the reader of the wedding -journey of a newly married couple, no longer very young, to be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I hall have nothing to do but to talk of some ordi- nary traits of American life as these appeared to them, to speak a little of well-known and easily accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of character. They had agreed to make their wedding-journey in the simplest and quietest way, and as it did not take place at once after their marriage, but some weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy from the outset. * How much better," said Isabel, "to go now, when nobody cares whether you go or stay, than to have started off upon a wretched wedding-break- fast, all tears and trousseau, and had people want- ing to see you aboard the cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of honey-moonshine about us ; we shall go just like anybody else, with a difference, dear, with a difference I " 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 aa bridal, shall we ? My one horror in life is an ev- ident bride." THE OUTSET. 8 Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to be taken for a bride ; and for my part I do not object to a woman's being of Isa- bel's age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have been very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when they met first, eight years before ; but he could not help recurring with an inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken engage- ment, which but for that fatality they might have spent together, he imagined, in just 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 4 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 ten- der spectacle before her. " O dear ! you'll never be able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It 's actually raining now ! " In fact, it was tne beginning of that terrible tonn of June, 1870. All in a moment, out of the 4 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us before we quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the clouds, and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible violence. In the square upon which our friends looked out of their dining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in the driving floods of the rain- fall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent themselves in desperate submission, and then with a great shudder rent away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail mingled with the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved the storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, where the lightning played like flames burning from the earth, while the thunder roared overhead without ceasing. There was some- thing splendidly theatrical about it all ; and when a street-car, laden to the last inch of its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under the stinging blows of the hail-stones, our friends felt as if it were an effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent reality in the affair, and at intervals during the storm they debated about going at all that day, iind 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 A.merica, he wished to give it at the beginning as pungent a national character as possible, and that THE OUTSET. 6 as he conld imagine nothing more peculiarly Amer- ican than a voyage to New York by a Fall River boat, they ought to take that route thither. So much upholstery, so much music, such variety 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 eagerly consented ; but these aesthetic motives were para- lyzed for her by the thought of passing Point Judith in a storm, and she descended from her high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence and the orchestra, and then to the idea of going by land in a sleeping-car. Having comfortably ac- complished this feat, she treated Basil's consent as a matter of course, not because she did not regard him, but because as a woman she could not conceive of the steps to her conclusion as unknown to him, and always treated her own decisions as the product of their common reasoning. But her husband held out for the boat, and insisted that if the storm fell before seven o'clock, they could reach it at Newport by the last express ; and it was this obstinacy that, in proof of Isabel's wisdom, obliged them to wait two hours in the station before going by the land route. The storm abated at five o'clock, and though the rain continued, it seemed well by a quarter of leven to set out for the Old Colony Depot, in sight rf which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. caused Isabel to seize her husband's arm, and to implore him, " O don't go by the boat ! " On this, Basil had the incredible weakness to yield; and bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot. It was the first swerving from the ideal in their wedding journey, but it was by no means the last ; though it must be confessed that it was early to begin. They both felt more tranquil when they were irretrievably committed by the purchase of their tickets, and when they sat down in the waiting- room of the station, with all the time between 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-mas- ter did his duty with pitiless celerity ; and so Ba- sil, in the mere excess of his disoccupation, bought an accident-insurance ticket. This employed him half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal contest, and went and took his place beside Isabel, who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl, perfectly content. " Isn't it charming," she said gayly, " having to wait so long ? It puts me in mind of some of those other journeys we took together. But I can't think of those times with any patience, when we might really have had each other, and didn't I Do you remember how long we had to wait at Chambe*ry ? and the numbers of military gentlemen that waited too, with their little waists, and their THE OUTSET. 7 kisses when they met ? and that poor married mili- tary gentleman, with the plain wile and the two children, and a tarnished uniform ? He seemed to be somehow in misfortune, and his mustache hung down in such a spiritless way, while all the other military mustaches about curled and bristled with so much boldness. I think salles d'attente every- where are delightful , and there is such a commun- ity of interest in them all, that when I come here only to go out to Brookline, I feel myself a travel- ler once more, a blessed stranger in a strange land. O dear, Basil, those were happy times after all, when we might have had each other and didn't ! And now we're the more precious for hav- ing been so long lost." She drew closer and closer to him, and looked at him in a way that threatened betrayal of her bri- dal character. " Isabel, you will be having your head on my Bhoulder, next," said he. " Never I " she answered fiercely, recovering her distance with a start. " But, dearest, if you do see me going to act absurdly, you know, do stop me" * I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop. Besides, I didn't undertake to preserve the incog- nito of this bridal party," If any accident of the sort dreaded had really happened, it would not have mattered so much, for is yet they were the sole occupants of the waiting THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. 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 THE OUTSET. 9 two would scarcely have drawn their notice to ouf pair. Yet Isabel did not so much even as put her hand into her husband's ; and as Basil afterwards said, it was very good practice. Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirrored in all that come near us, and our friends were fated to meet frequent parodies of their hap- piness from first to last on this journey. The trav- esty began with the very first people who entered the waiting-room after themselves, and who were a very young couple starting like themselves upon a pleasure tour, which also was evidently one of the first tours of any kind that they had made. It was of modest extent, and comprised going to New York and back ; but they talked of it with a flut- tered and joyful expectation as if it were a voyage to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque of their happiness (but with a touch of tragedy) hi that kind of young man who is called by the fe- males of his class a fellow, and two young women of that kind known to him as girls. He took a place between these, and presently began a robust flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself, after a brief struggle, of her parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with a sort of tender rude- ness, inconceivable vapidities, such as you would expect from none but a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus courted became selfishly unconscious of everything .but her own joy, and made no at- tempt to bring the other girl within its warmth. 10 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. but left her to languish forgotten on the other side. The latter sometimes leaned forward, and tried to divert a little of the flirtation to herself, but the flirters snubbed her with short answers, and pres- ently she gave up and sat still in the sad patience of uncourted women. In this attitude she became a burden to Isabel, who was glad when the three took themselves away, and were succeeded by a very stylish couple from New York, she knew as well as if they had given her their address on West 999th Street. The lady was not pretty, and she was not, Isabel thought, dressed in the perfect taste of Boston ; but she owned frankly to herself that the New-Yorkeress was stylish, undeniably effective. The gentleman bought a ticket for New York, and remained at the window of the office talking quite easily with the seller. " You couldn't do that, my poor Basil," said Isabel, " you'd be afraid." " O dear, yes ; I'm only too glad to get off with- out browbeating ; though I must say that this offi- cer looks affable enough. Really," he added, as an acquaintance of the ticket-seller came in and nod- ded to him and said " Hot, to-day I " " this is very strange. I always felt as if these men had no pri- vate life, no friendships like the rest of us. On duty they seem so like sovereigns, set apart from mankind, and above us all, that it 's quite incredible they should have the common personal relations." At intervals of their talk and silence there cam* THE OUTSET. 11 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 doubta of their wisdom whenever these acknowledgment* were withheld. Isabel went so far as to say that she hoped nothing would happen to the boat, but I think she would cheerfully have learnt that the vessel had been obliged to put back to Newport, on JKXJOunt of the storm, or even that it had been driven ashore at a perfectly safe place. People constantly came and went in the waiting- room, which was sometimes quite full, and again empty of all but themselves. In the course of their observations they formed many cordial friend- ships and bitter enmities upon the ground of per- sonal appearance, or particulars of dress, with peo- ple whom they saw for half a minute upon an average ; and they took such a keen interest in every one, that it would be hard to say whether they were more concerned in an old gentleman vrith vigorously upright iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, and reading all the evening papers, or a young man who hurled himself through the door, bought a ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and then ran down a departing train before it got out of the station : they loved the old gentleman for a certain stubborn benevo- lence of expression, and if they had been friends of the young man and his family for generations, 12 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNEY. and felt bound if any harm befell him to go ana break the news gently to his parents, their nervea could not have been more intimately wrought upon by his hazardous behavior. Still, as they had their tickets for New York, and he was going out on a merely local train, to Brookline, I believe, they could not, even in their anxiety, repress a feel- ing of contempt for his unambitious destination. They were already as completely cut off from local associations and sympathies as if they were a thousand miles and many months away from Boa- ton. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas jets as a gust of wind drew through the station ; they shared the gloom and isolation of a man who took a seat in the darkest corner of the room, and sat there with folded arms, the genius of absence. In the patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country they noted and approved the vases of cut- flowers in the booth of the lady who checked pack- ages, and the pots of ivy in her windows. " These poor Bostonians," they said, " have some love of the beautiful in their rugged natures." But after all was said and thought, it was only eight o'clock, and they still had an hour to wait. Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a sub- tile interpretation of his uneasiness, "/ 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." THE OUTSET. 13 This was said con stizza, the least little sugges- tion of it ; but Basil rose with shameful alacrity. " Darling, if it 's your wish " " It 's my fate, Basil," said Isabel. " I'll go," he exclaimed, " because it ign't bridal, and will help us to pass for old married people." " No, no, Basil, be honest ; fibbing isn't your forte : I wonder you went into the insurance busi- ness ; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps, or think you may be so before we get to New York. I shall amuse myself well enough here." I suppose it is always a little shocking and griev- ous to a wife when she recognizes a rival in butch- ers'-meat and the vegetables of the season. With her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery and her dainty habits of lunching, she cannot rec- oncile with the ideal her husband's capacity for breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at all hours of the day and night as they write it on the sign-boards of barbaric eating-houses. But Isabel would have only herself to blame if she had not perceived this trait of Basil's before marriage She recurred now, as his figure disappeared down the station, to memorable instances of his appetite in bheir European travels during their first engage- ment. " Yes, he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too full of the notion of getting into Italy to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I 14 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY. thought I must break with him on account oi the wild-boar; and at Heidelberg, the sausage and the ham! how could he, in my presence? But I took him with all his faults, and was glad to get him," she added, ending her meditation with a little burst of candor ; and she did not even think of Basil's appetite when he reappeared. With the thronging of many sorts of people, in parties and singly, into the waiting room, they be- eame once again mere observers of their kind, more or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so THE OUTSET. 16 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 01 manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The ticket-seller's stamp clicked incessantly as he sold tickets to all points South and West: to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston; to New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha ; to St. Paul, Duluth, St. Louis ; and it would not have been hard to find in that anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness, an image of the whole busy affair of life. It was not a par- ticularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off 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 imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive ? In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last an old woman, so very infirm that she had to be upheld on either hand by her husband and the hackman who had brought them, while a young girl went before with shawls and pillows which she arranged upon the seat. There the invalid lay down, and turned towards the crowd a white, suffer- ing face, which was yet so heavenly meek and peaceful that it comforted whoever looked at it. 16 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNEY. In spirit our happy friends bowed themselves before it and owned that there was something better than happiness in it. " What is it like, Isabel ? " " O, I don't know, darling," she said ; but she thought, " Perhaps it is like some blessed sorrow that takes us out of this prison of a world, and sets us free of our every-day hates and desires, our aims, our fears, ourselves. Maybe a long and mor- tal sickness might come to wear such a face hi one of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret the poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had fallen away." She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whose face beamed a tender smile, as Isabel spoke to her. A chord thrilled in two lives hitherto un- known to each other ; but what was said Basil would not ask when the invalid had taken Isabel's hand between her own, as for adieu, and she came back to his side with swimming eyes. Perhaps his wife could have given no good reason for her emo- tion, if he had asked it. But it made her very sweet and dear to him ; and I suppose that when a tolerably unselfish man is once secure of a woman's love, he is ordinarily more affected by her compas- sion and tenderness for other objects than by her teelings towards himself. He likes well enough to think, " She loves me," but still better, " How kind and good she is ! " They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of THE OUTSET. 17 getting places on the cars, and they never saw her again. The man at the wicket-gate leading to the train had thrown it up, and the people were press- ing furiously through as if their lives hung upon the chance of instant passage. Basil had secured 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 declares that there 's nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it 's a young mother, or a little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her heart. She wonders they can live through it." " Clara is very much of a reformer, and would make an end of all of us men, I suppose, except her father, who supports her in the leisure that en- ables her to do her deep thinking. She little knows what we poor fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours, and sob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the same strain ? " " O no ! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a blessed life. Perhaps it i 18 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. was that made me shed those few small tears. She seemed a very religious person." " Yes," said Basil, " it is almost a pity that relig- ion is going out. But then you are to have the franchise." " AU aboard ! " This warning cry saved him from whatever her- esy he might have been about to utter ; and pres- ently the train carried them out into the gas- sprinkled darkness, with an ever-growing speed that soon left the city lamps far behind. It is a phe- nomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the night- express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The draw-bridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rock trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have placed in your path, you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your help- lessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of secu- rity ; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleep- ing car, and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that yon THE OUTSET. 19 can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure it ; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic facts in the world. To the fantastic mood which pos- sesses you equally, sleeping or waking, the stop- pages of the train have a weird character ; and Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in dream-land 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 pas- sengers getting on and off ; then of some one, con- ductor or station-master, walking the whole length of the train ; and then 'you are aware of an insane satisfaction in renewed flight through the darkness. You think hazily of the folk in their beds in the town left behind, who stir uneasily at the sound of your train's departing whistle ; and so all is a blank vigil or a blank slumber. By daylight Basil and Isabel found themselves at opposite ends of the car, struggling severally with the problem of the morning's toilet. When the combat was ended, they were surprised at the decency of their appearance, and Isabel said, " 1 think I'm presentable to an early Broadway pub- lic, and I've a fancy for not going to a hotel. Lucy will be expecting us out there before noon ; and we can pass the time pleasantly enough for a few hours 20 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY just wandering about." She was a woman who loved any cheap de- fiance of custom, and she had an agreeable sense of adventure in what she proposed. Be- sides, she felt that noth- ing could be more in the unconventional spir- it in which they meant to make their whole journey than a stroll about New York at half- past six in the morning, " Delightful I " an- swered Basil, who was always charmed with these small originalities. " You look well enough for an evening party ; and besides, you won't meet one of your own critical class on Broad- way at this hour. We will breakfast at one of those gilded metropol- itan restaurants, and go round to Leonard's, who will be able to us just "-hree unhurried seconds. After that push on out to his place." then give THE OUTSET. 21 At that early hour there were not many people astir on the wide avenue down which our friends strolled when they left the station ; but in the aspect of those they saw there was something that told of a greater heat than they had yet known in Boston, and they were sensible of having reached a more southern latitude. The air, though freshened by the over-night's storm, still wanted the briskness and sparkle and pungency of the Boston air, which is as delicious in summer as it is terrible in winter ; and the faces that showed themselves were sodden from the yesterday's heat and perspiration. A corner-grocer, seated in a sort of fierce despondency upon a keg near his shop door, had lightly equipped himself for the struggle of the day in the battered armor of the day before, and in a pair of roomy pantaloons, and a baggy shirt of neutral tint, perhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst the siege of the hot weather lasted, now con- fronted the advancing sunlight, before which the long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring. A marketing mother of a family paused at a pro- vision-store, and looking weakly in at the white- aproned butcher among his meats and flies, passed without an effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied shop-girls tripped by in the draperies that betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby ; from a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those cool young New Yorkers whom no circumstances can oppress : breezy-coated, white-linened, clean, 22 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the elbow of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning's news is snatched, 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 THE OUTSET. 28 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 thoU' sands within doors prolonging, befoie the day'i terror began, the oblivion of sleep. As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway, and found themselves hi 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 *f Art, Were not more lone to one who first Upon its giant silence burst, Than this strange quiet, where the ride Of life, upheaved on either side, Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat With human waves the Morning Street." 41 How lovely ! " said Isabel, swiftly catching at her skirt, and deftly escaping contact with one of a long row of ash-barrels posted sentinel-like on the edge of the pavement. " Whose is it, Basil ? " " Ah ! a poet's," answered her husband, " a man of whom we shall one day any of us be glad to say that we liked him before he was famous. What 24 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. nebulous sweetness the first lines have, and what a clear, cool light of day-break in the last ! " " You could have been as good a poet as that, Basil," said the ever-personal and concretely-speak- ing Isabel, who could not look at a mountain with- out thinking what Basil might have done in that way, if he had tried. " O no, I couldn't, dear. It 's very difficult being any poet at all, though it's easy to be like one. But I've done with it ; I broke with the Muse the day you accepted me. She came into my office, looking so shabby, not unlike one of those poor shop- girls ; and as I was very well dressed from having just been to see you, why, you know, I felt the dif- ference. ' 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 hi those clothes.' ' O,' she moaned out, ' you used to welcome me at all times, out in the country, and thought me prettily dressed.' ' Yes, yes ; but this is Boston ; and Boston makes a great difference in one's ideas ; and I'm going to be married, too. Come, I don't want to seem ungrateful ; we have had many pleasant times together, I own it ; and I've no objections to your being present at Christ- mas and Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I must draw the line there.' She gave me a look THE OUTSET. 25 that made my heart ache, and went straight to my desk and took out of a pigeon-hole a lot of pa- pers, odes upon your cruelty, Isabel ; songs to you ; sonnets, the sonnet, a mighty poor one, I 'd made the day before, and threw them all into the grate. Then she turned to me again, signed adieu with mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the bottom wire of the poor thing's hoop-skirt clicking against each step of the stairway, as she went slowly and heavily down to the street." "O don't 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 doesn't like being laughed at any more than another woman would, and she would have left me shortly. No, I couldn't be a poet like our Morning-Street friend. But see ! the human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement with cooks and second-girls." They were frowzy serving-maids and silent ; each swept down her own door steps and the pave- ment in front of her own house, and then knocked her broom on the curbstone and vanished into the house, on which the hand of change had already fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to the domestic goda, but had been invaded at more 26 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. 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 bonnets ; here even a publisher had hung his sign beside a door, through which the feet of young ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children to patter. Here and there stood groups of dwellings unmolested as yet outwardly ; but even these had a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew themselves to be cheapish boarding-houses or fur- nished lodgings for gentlemen, and were trying *o 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 clawing for bits of coal. By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some omnibuses beginning iheir long day's travel up and down the handsome, tire- gome length of that avenue ; but for the most part it was empty. There was, of course, a hurry of foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but these were sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper was still fast asleep. The waiter at the restaurant into which our friends stepped was so well aware of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of the city, that he could not forbear a little patron- age of them, which they did not resent. He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric abundance, and charged for it with barbaric splen- THE OUTSET. 27 dor. It IB 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 ha,ve 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 vrith 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 different rooms; there clinked the trowel upon the brick, yonder the ham- mer on the stone ; overhead swung and threatened the marble block that the derrick was lifting to its place. As yot these forces of demolition and con- struction had the business of the street almost to themselves. " Why, how shabby the street is 1 " said Isabel, at last. " When I landed, after being abroad, I remember that Broadway impressed me with it* splendor." 28 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. " Ah I but you were merely coming from Eu- rope then ; and now you arrive from Boston, and are contrasting this poor Broadway with Washing- ton Street. Don't be hard upon it, Isabel ; every street can't be a Boston street, you know," said Basil. Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great in- tensity both by birth and conviction, believed her husband the only man able to have thoroughly baffled the malignity of the stars in causing him to be born out of Boston ; yet he sometimes trifled with his hardly achieved triumph, and even showed an indifference to it, with an insincerity of which there can be no doubt whatever. " O stuff ! " she retorted, "as if I had any of that silly local pride ! Though you know well enough that Boston is the best place in the world. But Basil ! I suppose Broadway strikes us as so fine, on coming ashore from Europe, because we hardly expect anything of America then." " Well, I don't know. Perhaps the street has some positive grandeur of its own, though it needs a multitude of people in it to bring out its best effects. I'll allow its disheartening shabbiness and meanness in many ways ; but to stand in front of Grace Church, on a clear day, a day of late September, say, and look down the swarming length of Broadway, on the movement and the numbers, while the Niagara roar swelled and swelled from those human rapids, was always like strong new wine to me. I don't think the world THE OUTSET. 29 affords such another sight ; and for one moment, at such times, I'd have been willing to be an Irish councilman, that I might have some right to the pride I felt in the capital of the Irish Republic. What a fine thing it must be for each victim of six centuries of oppression to reflect that he owns at least a dozen Americans, and that, with his fellows, he rules a hundred helpless millionaires ! " Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel knew nothing about politics, and she felt that she was getting into deep water ; she answered buoy- antly, but she was glad to make her weariness the occasion of hailing a stage, and changing the con versation. The farther down town they went the busier the street grew ; and about the Astor House, where they alighted, there was already a bustle that nothing but a fire could have created at the same hour in Boston. A little farther on the steeple of Trinity rose high into the scorching sun- light, while below, in the shadow that was darker than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among their flowers. " How still they lie ! " mused the happy wife, peering through the iron fence in passing. " Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poor things I " said Basil ; and through both their minds flashed the wonder if they should ever come to Bomething like that ; but it appeared so impossible that they both smiled at the absurdity. 44 It 'B too early yet for Leonard," continued 10 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. Basil ; " what a pity the church-yard is lockad 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 'a 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 ele- ment in its freshness. You can imagine it's sheap how they used to see Mr. Burr and Mr. Hamilton down there." All places that fashion has once loved and aban- doned are very melancholy ; but of all such places, I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are there gome sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots ? I believe so, but I do not make sure ; I am certain only of the mangy grass-plots, or rather the spaces between the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morn- ing when our friends, with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, aw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hun- gry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving list- lessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best dress of some happier child, a gay little gar- THE OUTSET. 81 merit cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when they had crawled out of their beds, to have put on only so much clothing as the law compelled. They abandoned themselves upon the green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean hands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared, silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible furnace, into which in those days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the child which the younger woman had brought with her feebly wailed unheeded at her side. On one side of these women were the shameless houses out of which they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation ; on the other side were those houses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down the 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 ia now the depot of emigration, stood certain express- wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-look- ing men. Beyond laughed and danced the fresh blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and smoke- stacks, " Well," said Basil, " I think if I could choose, I should like to be a friendless German boy, setting S2 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY foot for the first time on this happy continent Fancy his rapture on beholding this lovely spot, ana these charming American faces I What a smiling aspect life in the New World must wear to his young eyes, and how his heart must leap within him!" " " Yes, Basil ; it 's all very pleasing, and thank you for bringing me. But if you don't think of any other New York delights to show me, do let us go and sit in Leonard's office till he comes, and then get out into the country as soon as possible." Basil defended himself against the imputation that he had been trying to show New York to his wife, or that he had any thought but of whiling away the long morning hours, until it should be time to go to Leonard. He protested that a knowl- edge of Europe made New York the most unin- teresting town in America, and that it was the last place in the world where he should think of amusing himself or any one else ; and then they both upbraided the city's bigness and dullness with an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know. They particularly derided the notion of New York's being loved by any one. It was immense, it waa grand in some ways, parts of it were exceedingly handsome ; but it was too vast, too coarse, too rest- less. They could imagine its being liked by a suc- 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 THE OUTSET. 88 poet or scholar, or any woman of wisdom and refine- ment, that they could not imagine. They could not think of any one's loving New York as Dante loved Florence, or as Madame de Stael loved Paris, or as Johnson loved black, homely, home-like London. A.nd as they twittered their little dispraises, the giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and more ccnscious 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 trails, 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 here ? " So the old marvel was wondered over I 84 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. anew, till it filled the world in which theie WM room for nothing but the strangeness that they should have loved each other so long and not made it known, that they should ever have uttered it, and that, being uttered, it should be so much more and better than ever could have been dreamed. The broken engagement was a fable of disaster that only made their present fortune more prosperous. The city ceased about them, and they walked on up the street, the first man and first woman in the garden of the new-made earth. As they were both very conscious people, they recognized in themselves some sense of this, and presently drolled it away, in the opulence of a time when every moment brought some beautiful dream, and the soul could be prodigal of its bliss. " I think if I had the naming of the animals over again, this morning, I shouldn't call snakes snakes ; should you, Eve ? " laughed Basil in intricate ac- knowledgment of his happiness. " O no, Adam ; we'd look out all the most grace- ful euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn't hurt the feelings of a spider." 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 coun- try ; and now, when they came in upon him at nine o'clock, he welcomed them with all his friend- ly heart. He rose from the pile of morning's letters to which he had but just sat down ; he placed them the easiest chairs ; he made a feint of its not being a busy hour with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which was still damp and odorous from the porter's broom, as a kind of down-town parlor ; but after they had briefly accounted to his 86 THEIR WEDDING JOURNET. amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had boasted of the original fashion in which they had that morning seen New York, they took pity on him, and bade him adieu till evening. They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street bj the ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in the train on the thither side of the water. " Don't tell me, Basil," said Isabel, " that Leon- ard travels fifty miles every day by rail going tc and from his work ! " " I must, dearest, if I would be truthful." " Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at the South End, aren't there ? " And in agreement upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as well as all acquirable merits, with after talk that need not be recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country station near which the Leonards dwelt. I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost of the reader, who sus- pects the excitements which a long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and they had not met since Isabel's re- turn from Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swal- lowed with surprising ease all that she had said in blame of Basil's conduct during the rupture, and exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit after their marriage. And A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. 37 now that they had come together, thei? only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which husbands could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leon- ard beheld in her friend's joy the sweet leflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as their great-grand- mothers could have been in the same circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other in their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. " Do you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her oppressor, after hay- ing given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon husbands, " that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have been married ten years ? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better and better 'ust because they've got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a little crude and garish compared with their happiness ; and yet '' she put up both her 88 THEIR WEDDIKG JOURNET. palms against his, and gave a vehement little pnsli " there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the proceedings." " Isabel," said her husband, with severity, "this ig bridal ! " " No matter ! I only want to seem an old mar- ried woman to the general public. But the appli- cation of it is that you must be careful not to con- tradict me, or cross me in anything, so that 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 precept of their friends ; and the time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperous New Yorkers who love both the excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite the enjoy- ment of both hi their daily existence. The sub- urbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction ; and everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard's, inhabited by men like him- self, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spond 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- A MIDSUMMER-DAY S DREAM. 39 put on their best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it come to an end ; yet they all resigned themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other re- sult than to detain the travellers into the 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. Besides it would bring them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the night there, or push on to Niagara by the night train. " You had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till you reach West Point, and you'll see all the best scenery. Then you can get a good night's rest, and start fresh in the morning." So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have done if they had been advised : " You had better go by the morning boat. It 's deliciously cool, travelling ; you see the whole of the river , you reach Albany for supper, and you push through to Niagara that night and are done with it." W THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and oi 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 A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. 41 tne very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another ; after every station the des- perate conductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket, which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction ; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The vtind buffeted faintly at the windows ; when the door was opened, the clatter of the rails struck through and through the car like a demoniac yell. Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so close and dead and mixed with the carbonic breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; tho roof seemed to hover lower and lower, and in ita coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies. In a convenient place in the station hung a ther- mometer, before which every passenger, on going 42 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the mercury w as 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 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, ac- cording to their different temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor. " Now the question is, my dear," said Basil when, free of the press, they lingered for a mo- ment in the shade outside, " whether we had bet- ter walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route we shall have sighta and smells which the other can't offer us, bat whichever we take we shall be sorry." A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DBEAM. 48 " 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 ex- ercised this philosophy with regard to the whole day's business, or if she could have given up her plans for it with the same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat ! It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we feel the same bitter need of pur- suing it to the end. The mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliber- ate dereliction ; the gentle sin of omission is all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Columbus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so ; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have sternly re- sisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Star- vation and Coldj who beckoned the Puritans shore- ward, and as soon as ever I came in sight of their granite perch should have turned back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors, and so. 44 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. 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 wiselier been left unaccomplished. Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming and stag- ing and variously cooling and calming by the way., until they reached the ticket-office on Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to the steamboat an hour or two before her depart- ure. She felt that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions already on this jour- ney, and she was resolved that the present half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original design. It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed, but it was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique, the spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements, and prospering on with every form of labor, and at a terrible cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls that 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 th A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. 45 dame-faced tormentor on tLe 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 ttnspared and unsparing weariness of selling ; in the street, filled by the hurry and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying. Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vision, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pil- grimage through that squalid street by the river-side, where presently they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars like their own coming and going up and down the cen- tre of a foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings (rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories) on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust that the hot breaths of wind caught up and aent swirling into the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of granite boulders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious and whom they were glad to leave behind wnen they alighted from the 46 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselves in the shade of the cross street. A little strip of shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow. With great A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DEEAM. 47 bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult tor- rents 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 vis- its, and of a purpose to go down town again, and of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brown- stone flights of steps, and their handsome, intoler- able uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets there was seldom a soul to be seen, so that when their ringing at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with a vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwarda they had kept up a show of i8 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY. talk in their wretched dream ; they had spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere ; and they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been so little recognized. They said that, the daily New York murder might even at that moment be somewhere taking place ; and that no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper circumstance ; they morbidly wondered what that day's murder would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the assassin streets by the river-sides, if indeed it did not befall in some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the master and leave him undiscovered and TIP mourned by the family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They conjectured of the horror of mid- summer battles, and pictured the anguish of ship- wrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit Care well, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the world. A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. 49 When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlading ; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead ; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size : there was no flagging of the piti- less energy that moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wed- ding- journey ers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and incidents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly sum- mer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun ; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life. \]1 sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted stages, with quivering horses uriven each by a mac who sat in the shade of a branching white urn- 60 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. brella, and suffered with a moody truculence ol aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness oi death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the foot-passengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though there were fewer women among them. Indomita- bly resolute of soul, they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there they showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before his death- white flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. An- other, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side, " I can't stand this much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart " But still the multitude hur- ried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the be- holder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this, looked on it unazed, and at last their own errands being accom- A MIDSUMMZR-DAY'S DBEAM. 51 plished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of purpose, they cried with one voice, that it was a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the soda-fountain sparkled. It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they en- tered they heard the next comer cry out with a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, " Ninety-seven degrees ! " Behind them at the dooi there poured in a ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at the shrine of heat, before he tossed off the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their coming they "issued through another door upon the side street, each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The group was of a very patient, half -frightened, half-puzzled looking gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handker- chief full of pounded ice, and easing one hand with ihe other when the first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as " The Sunstroke " would sell enormously in the hot. season. " Better take a little more of thab,"" the apothecary said, looking up from his prescription, and, as the organized sympathy of the seemingly 62 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his pa- tient, who thereupon tasted something in the glaaa A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DBEAM. 58 he held. " Do you still feel like fainting ? " asked the humane authority. " Slightly, now and then," answered the other, " but I'm hanging on hard to the bottom carve 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, occa- sionally, and have no features to speak of. But I don't know that I look very impressive myself," he added in the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Americans in the face of all embarrass- ments. " O, you'll do ! " the apothecary answered, with a laugh ; but he said, in answer to an anxious ques- tion from the lady, " He mustn't be moved for an hour yet," and gay ly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband's skull. Isa- bel offered her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door. " What a shocking thing ! " she whispered. " Did you see how all the people looked, one after another, so in- differently at that couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant ? It was dreadful. I shouldn't ike 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 shorJd prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the kindest aa 64 THED5 WEDDING JOUBNET. well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousand* of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Le- vite would be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give me the busiest part of Broadway for a sun-stroke. There is such experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothecary's was merely ex- hausted by the heat, and ran in there for revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd may be a little ennuy of sun-strokes, and to that degree indifferent, but they most likely know that they can only do harm by an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as they have delegated their helpfulness to the proper authority, and go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn't know what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so that no breath of air could reach the victim." " May be so, dear," said the wife, pensively ; " but if anything did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spectators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps I'm a little exacting." " I think you are. Nothing is so hard as tc understand that there are human beings in this A MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM. 55 world besides one's self and one's set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn't you and I there in the apothecary's shop, as it might very well be ; and let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible 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 ' over, to have seen the worst." m. THE NIGHT BOAT. THERE is lit- tle proportion about either pain or pleas- ure : a head- ache darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. Therefore I do not think it trivial or untrue to say that there is for the moment nothing more satisfactory in life than to have bought your ticket on the night boat up the Hudson and secured your state-room key an hour or two before departure, and some time even before the pressure at the clerk's office has begun. In the transaction with this cas- tellated baron, you have of course been treated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your self- respect swells with a sense of having escaped posi- tive insult ; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket against its gutta-percha number, and you walk up THE NIGHT BOAT. 57 and down the gorgeously carpeted, single-columned, two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas and chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristo- cratic gloom of the yellow waiters. Your own state- room as you enter it from time to time is an ever- new surprise of splendors, a magnificent effect of amplitude, of mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains, and of marble topped wash-stand. In the mere wan- tonness of an unalloyed prosperity you say to the saffron nobleman nearest your door, " Bring me a pitcher of ice-water, quick, please ! " and you do not find the half-hour that he is gone very long. If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much pleasure from these things, then imagine the infinite comfort of our wedding-journeyers, transported from Broadway on that pitiless afternoon to the shelter and the quiet of that absurdly palatial steamboat. It was not yet crowded, and by the river-side there was almost a freshness in the air. They disposed of their troubling bags and packages ; they com- plimented the ridiculous princeliness of their state- room, and then they betook themselves to the sheltered space aft of the saloon, where they sat down for the tranquiller observance of the wharf and whatever should come to be seen by them. Like all people who have just escaped with their lives from some menacing calamity, they were very philosophical in spirit ; and having got aboard of their own motion, and being neither of them ap- 68 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. parently the worse for the ordeal they had passed through, were of a light, conversational temper. "What an amusingly superb affair ! " Basil cried as they glanced through an open window down the long vista of the saloon. " Good heavens ! Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain republicans to Albany in comfort and safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise ? Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter," he added. " I am spoilt for ordinary paint and upholstery from thia hour ; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and a humble three-story swell-front up at the South End is EO longer the place for me. Dearest, " 'Let ns swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind/ never to leave this Aladdin's-palace-like steamboat, but spend our lives in perpetual trips up and down the Hudson." To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly sketched the life they could lead aboard. Since they could not help it, they mocked the public provision which, leaving no in- terval between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our democratic manage to the taste of the richest and most extravagant ple- beian amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is thia ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the iteamboat berth into which he gets with his pan- THE NIGHT BOAT. 59 fcaloons on, and out of which lie 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 Uia surfeit ; it is he who perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and the reluctance of the waiters ; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with his womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel sit. Personally, he is not so bad ; he is good-looking, like all of us ; he is better dressed than most of us ; he behaves himself quietly, if not easily ; and no lord so loathes a scene. Next year he is going to Europe, where he will not show to so much advantage as here ; but for the present it would be hard to say in what way he is vulgar, and perhaps vulgarity is not so common a thing after all. It was something besides the river that made the air so much more sufferable than it had been. Over the city, since our friends had come aboard the boat, a black cloud had gathered and now hung low upon it, while the wind from the face of the water took the dust in the neighboring streets, and frol- icked it about the house-tops, and in the faces of the arriving passengers, who, as the moment of depart- ure drew near, appeared in constantly increasing numbers and in greater variety, with not only the trepidation of going upon them, but also with the electrical excitement people feel before a tempest. 60 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The breast of the black cloud was now zigzagged from moment to moment by lightning, and claps of deafening thunder broke from it. At last the long endurance of the day was spent, and out of its con- vulsion burst floods of rain, again and again sweep- ing the promenade-deck where the people sat, and 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 trem- ble away from her moorings and set forth upon her trip. " Ah ! if we had only taken the day boat ! " moaned Isabel. " Now, we shall see nothing of the river landscape, and we shall never be able to put ourselves down when we long for Europe, by declar- ing that the scenery of the Hudson is much finer than that of the Rhine." Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured couple, that they would be just even to the elements, which had by no means been generous to them ; and they owned that if so noble a storm had cele- brated their departure upon some storied river from some more romantic port than New York, they would have thought it an admirable thing. Even whilst they contented themselves, the storm passed, and left a veiled and humid sky overhead, that gave a charming softness to the scene on which their eyes fell when they came out of the saloon again, and took theii places with a largely increased com pan ion ship on the deck. THE NIGHT BOAT. 61 They had already reached that part 01 the river where the uplands begin, and their course was be- tween stately walls of rocky steepness, or wooded elopes, or grassy hollows, the scene forever losing and taking grand and lovely shape. Wreaths of mist hung about the tops of the loftier headlands, and long shadows draped their sides. As the night grew, lights twinkled from a lonely house here and there in the valleys ; a swarm of lamps showed a town where it lay upon the lap or at the foot of the hills. Behind them stretched the great gray river, haunted -vrith many sails ; now a group of canal' boats grappled together, and having an air of cozi- ness in their adventure upon this strange current out of their own sluggish waters, drifted out of 62 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. sight ; and now a smaller and slower steamer, making a laborious show of keeping up was passed, and reluctantly fell behind ; along the water's edge rattled and hooted the frequent trains. They could not tell at any time what part of the river they were on, and they could not, if they would, have made its beauty a matter of conscientious observa- tion ; but all the more, therefore, they deeply en- joyed it without reference to time or place. They lelt some natural pain when they thought that they might unwittingly pass the scenes that Irving has made part of the common dream-land, and they would fain have seen the lighted windows of the house out of which a cheerful ray has penetrated to so many hearts ; but being sure of nothing, as they were, they had the comfort of finding the Tappan Zee in every expanse of the river, and of discover- ing Sunny-Side on every pleasant slope. By virtue of this helplessness, the Hudson, without ceasing to be the Hudson, became from moment to moment all fair and stately streams upon which they had voy- aged or read of voyaging, from the Nile to the Mis- sissippi. There is no other travel like river travel ; it is the perfection of movement, and one might well desire never to arrive at one's destination. The abundance of room, the free, pure air, the con- stant delight of the eyes in the changing landscape, the soft tremor of the boat, so steady upon her keel, the variety of the little world on board, all form A charm which no good heart in a sound body can THE NIGHT BOAT. 6b resist. So, whilst the twilight held, well content, in contiguous chairs, they purred in flattery of their kindly fate, imagining different pleasures, certainly, but none greater, and tasting to its subtlest flavor the happiness conscious of itself. Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so interesting to them in this objective light, that they had little desire to turn from its contemplation to the people around them ; and when at last they did so, it was still with lingering glances of self -recognition and enjoyment. They divined rightly that one of the main conditions of their present felicity was the fact that they had seen so much of time and of the world, that they had no longer any desire to take behold- ing eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure, and they understood that then prosperous love ac- counted as much as years and travel for this result. If they had had a loftier opinion of themselves, their indifference to others might have made them offensive ; but with their modest estimate of their own value in the world, they could have all the comfort of self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity. " O yes ! " said Basil, in answer to some apos- trophe to their bliss from Isabel, " it 's the greatest imaginable satisfaction to have lived past certain things. I always knew that I was not a very hand- some or otherwise captivating person, but I can re- member years now blessedly remote when I never could see a young girl without hoping she vrould mistake me for something of that sort. I 64 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. couldn't help desiring that some fascination of mine, which had escaped my own analysis, would have an effect upon her. I dare say all young men are BO. I used to live for the possible interest I might inspire in your sex, Isabel. They controlled my movements, my attitudes ; they forbade me re- pose ; and yet I believe I was no ass, but a toler- ably sensible fellow. Blessed be marriage, I am free at last ! All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest, and it 's mighty little, is mere pageant to me ; and I thank Heaven that I can meet the most stylish girl now upon the broad level of our common humanity. Besides, it seems to me that our experience of life has quieted us in many other ways. What a luxury it is to sit here, and reflect that we do not want any of these peo- ple to suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful, or well dressed, and do not care to show off in any sort of way before them ! " This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just sense of their contrast to the group of people near- est them, a young man of the second or third quality and two young girls. The eldest of these ras carrying on a vivacious flirtation with the foung man, who was apparently an acquaintance jf brief standing ; the other was scarcely more than a child, and sat somewhat abashed at the sparkle of the colloquy. They were conjecturally sisters going home from some visit, and not skilled in the world, but of a certain repute in their country THE NIGHT BOAT. 66 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 travelled many thousands of miles in all parts of the country. The encounter was visibly that kind of adventure which both would treasure up for future celebration to their different friends ; and it had a brilliancy and interest which they could not even now consent to keep to themselves. They talked to each other and at all the company within hearing, and exchanged curt speeches which had for them all the sensation of repartee. Young Man. They say that beauty unadorned is adorned the most. Young Woman (bridling, and twitching her head from side to side, in the high excitement of the dialogue). Flattery is out of place. Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don't believe me, you ask your mother when you get home. (Titter from the younger sister.) Young Woman (scornfully). Umph ! my mother has no control over me ! Young Man. Nobody else has, either, / should ay. (Admiringly.) Young Woman. Yes, you've told the truth for once, for a wonder. I'm able to take care of my- self, perfectly. (Almost hoarse with a sense of sarcastic performance.) 66 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. Young Man. " Whole team and big dog under the wagon," as they say out West. Young Woman. Better a big dog than a puppy, any day. and horror from the younger sister, sen- THE NIGHT BOAT. 67 sation in the young man, and so much rapture in the young woman that she drops the key of her state-room from her hand. They both stoop, and a jocose scuffle for it ensues, after which the talk takes an autobiographical turn on the part of the young man, and drops into an unintelligible mur- mur. Ah ! poor Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face ?) Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one young and the other old, talking of some business out of which the latter had retired. The younger had been asked his opinion upon some point, and he was expanding with a flattered consciousness of the elder's perception of his importance, and toady- ing to him with the pleasure which all young men feel in winning the favor of seniors in their voca tion. " Well, as I was a-say'n', Isaac don't seem to haf no natcheral pent for the glothing business. Man gomes in and wands a goat," he seemed to be speaking of a garment and not a domestic ani- mal, " Isaac'll zell him the goat he wands him to puy, and he'll make him believe it 's the goat he was a lookin' for. Well, now, that's well enough as far as it goes ; but you know and 1 know, Mr. Rosenthal, that that 's no way to do business. A man gan't zugzeed that goes upon that brincible. Id 's wrong. Id 's easy enough to make a man puy the goat you want him to, if he wands a goat, but tae thing is to make him puy 68 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. th(. goat that you wand to zell when he dont wand no goat at all. You've asked me what I thought and I've dold you. Isaac'll never zugzeed in the redail glothing-business in the world ! " " Well," sighed the elder, who filled his arm- chair quite full, and quivered with a comfortable jelly-like tremor in it, at every pulsation of the en- gine, " I was afraid of something of the kind. Aa you say, Benjamin, he don't seem to have no pent for it. And yet I proughd him up to the business ; I drained him to it, myself." Besides these talkers, there were scattered singly, or grouped about in twos and threes and fours, the various people one encounters on a Hudson River boat, who are on the whole different from the pas- sengers on other rivers, though they all have feat- ures in common. There was that man of the sud- den gains, who has already been typified ; and there was also the smoother rich man of inherited wealth, from whom you can somehow know the former so readily. They were each attended by their several retinues of womankind, the daughters all much alike, but the mothers somewhat differ- ent. They were going to Saratoga, where perhaps the exigencies of fashion would bring them ac- quainted, and where the blue blood of a quarter of A century would be kind to the yesterday's fluid of warmer hue. There was something pleasanter in the face of the hereditary aristocrat, but not so ttrong, nor, altogether, so admirable ; particularly THE NIGHT BOAT. 69 if you reflected that he really represented nothing in the world, no great culture, no political influ- ence, no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary force, nothing 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 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 stand- ing near beside the guard, whose face Basil and Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concern ing whom, they romanced that he was going home, wherever his home was, with the manuscript of a rejected book in his pocket. They imagined him no great things of a poet, to be sure, but his pen- sive face claimed delicate feeling for him, and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured un- consciously caught flavors of Tennyson and Brown- ing in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morrif for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods and heroes of the nineteenth century, that he waa now carrying back from New York with him ? Basil sketched from the colors of his own long- aocepted disappointments a moving little picture 70 THEIR WEDDING JOURNFT. 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 maga- zines some of the shorter pieces out of the " And other Poems " which were to have filled up the volume. " He 's going back rather stunned and bewildered ; but it 's something to have tasted the city, and its bitter may turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till he finds himself longing for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow ! one compas- sionate 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 com- fortable, 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 v now a farce of the broadest, now a latent tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed, of either were at work Unere, and this was but one brief scene of the immense complex drama which was to proceed BO variously in such different times and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity. The con < trasts were sharp : each group had its travesty in some other ; the talk of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next ; but of all THE NIGHT BOAT. 7l these parodies none was so terribly effective as the fcwo 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 in- numerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land and time, each solitary forever, yet all bound together in the unity of an imperishable slavery and shame. What a stale effect I What hackneyed charac- ters ! Let us be glad the night drops her curtain upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the other actors from our view. Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there were numbers of people lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes of talk or vacancy ; and at the tables there were others reading " Lothair," a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very fashionable book indeed. There was in the air that odor of paint and carpet which prevails on steamboats ; the glass drops of the chandeliers ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her respiration, like * comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious feel- ing of coziness and security to our travellers. 72 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot's bell signaling the engi- neer to slow the boat. There was a moment of perfect silence ; then all the drops of the chande- liers in the saloon clashed musically together ; then fell another silence ; and at last came wild cries f 01 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 state-room window some lights shone faintly on the water at a distance. " Wait here, Isabel ! " said her husband. " We've run down a boat. We don't seem hurt ; but I'll go see. I'll be back in a minute." Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a world wildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it was the fashion for ladies to wear their hair down their backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to speak to each other without introduction. The place with which she had felt so familiar a little 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 whisper- ing panic-stricken conjectures. There was no rush- ing to and fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there wras not a man to be seen, for apparently they had THE NIGHT BOAT. 78 all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the calam- ity. A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it was 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 together shunned and friendless. Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had be- come known to Isabel and the rest that their OWD steamer had suffered no harm, but that she had struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of canal-boats, from which those alarming cries and curses had come. The steamer was now lying by for the small boats she had sent out to pick up the crew of the sunken vessel. " Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chan- deliers," said one of the ladies. " Is it such a very slight matter to run down another boat and sink it?" She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered lightly, " I don't think you ladies ought to have been disturbed at all. In running over a common tow-boat 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." 74 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of humor, listened with undisguised displeasure to this speech. It dispersed them, in fact ; some turned away to bivouac for the rest of the night upon the arm-chairs and sofas, while others returned to their rooms. With the latter went Isabel. " Lock mo in, Basil," she said, with a bold meekness, " and if anything more happens don't wake me till the last moment." It was hard to part from him, but she felt that his vigil would somehow be useful to the boat, and she confidingly fell into a sleep that lasted till daylight. Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly devolved so great a responsibility, went forward to the promenade in front of the saloon, in hopes of learning something more of the catastrophe from the people whom he had already found gathered there. A large part of the passengers were still there, seated or standing about in earnest colloquy. They were in that mood which follows great excitement, and in which the feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk. At such times one feels that a sen- sible frame of mind is unsympathetic, and if ex- pressed, unpopular, or perhaps 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, wearing silk travelling-cap. He had a face of stupid THE NIGHT BOAT. 76 benignity and a self-satisfied smirk ; and he was formally trying to put at his ease, and hopelessly confusing the loutish youth before him. " You say you saw the whole accident, and you're probably the only passenger that did see it. You'll be the most important witness at the trial," he added, 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. " That is," added the witness, " it seemed as if we struck her amidships, and cut her in two, and sunk her." " Just so," continued the examiner, accepting the explanation, " bows on. Now I want to ask if you saw our captain or any of the crew about ? " " Not a soul," said the witness, with the solem- nity of a man already on oath. "That'll do," exclaimed the other. "This gentleman's experience coincides exactly with my own. I didn't see the collision, but I did see the cloud of steam from the sinking boat, and I saw her go down. There wasn't an officer to be found anywhere on board our boat. I looked about for the captain and the mate myself, and couldn'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. 76 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap ncrw 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 just see, gentle- men, what a little thing, humanly speaking, life de- pends upon. If that old woman had been able to sleep, and hadn't sent that boy down to warn the train, we should have run into the rock and been dashed to pieces. The passengers made up a purse for the boy, and I wrote a full account of it to the papers." " Well," said one of the group, a man in a hard hat, " I never lie down on a steamboat or a railroad train. I want to be ready for whatever happens." The others looked at this speaker with interest, as one who had invented a safe method of travel. " I happened to be up to-night, but I almost al- ways undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my own house," said the gentleman of the silk cap, THE NIGHT BOAT. 7T 14 1 don't say your way isn'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 compromising spirit who held that it was better to throw off your coat and boots, but keep your pantaloons on. Meanwhile, the steamer was hanging idle upon the current, against which it now and then stirred a careless wheel, still waiting for the return of the small boats. Thin gray clouds, through rifts of which a star sparkled keenly here and there, veiled the heavens ; shadowy bluffs loomed up on either hand ; in a hollow on the left twinkled a drowsy little town ; a beautiful stillness lay on all. After an hour's interval a shout was heard from far down the river ; then later the plash of oars ; then a cry hailing the approaching boats, and the answer, " All safe ! " Presently the boats had come alongside, and the passengers crowded down to the guard to learn the details of the search. Basil heard a hollow, moaning, gurgling sound, regular as that of the machinery, for some note of which he mistook it. " Clear the gangway there I " shouted a gruff voice; "man scalded here I" And a burden was carried by from which fluttered, with its terrible regularity, that utterance of mortal an- guish. Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the morning come. 78 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The boat swiftly ascended the current, and pres- ently the steeper shores were left behind ani the banks fell away in long upward sloping fields, with farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visi- ble in the generous expanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawing his nets, and bending from his boat, there near Albany, N. Y., in the pic- turesque immortal attitudes of Raphael's Galilean fisherman ; and now a flush mounted the pale face of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the dawn there came, more to the sight than any other sense, a vague menace of heat. But as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil bathed fyis weariness hi it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion of the scalded man, and how he was to fare that day. This poor wretch seemed of another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the happy, and Basil's pity was quite an abstraction ; which, again, amused and shocked him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little more earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien creature here and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to the disaster of the night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft of her who so filled his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security of sleep, Death had passed them both so close that his presence might well have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg that grazes the ship in the night freezes all the air about it. But it was quite idle : where love was. THE NIGHT BOAT. 79 life only was ; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden that he would have laid upon them ; his revery reflected with delicious caprice the looks, the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore hiii far away from the sad images that he had in- vited to mirror themselves in it. IV. A DAY'S EAH.EOADINO. HAPPINESS has com- monly a good appe- tite ; and the thought of the for- tunately ended ad- ventures of the night, the fresh morning air, and the content of their own hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the boat reached Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated with spirit the question of breakfast and the best place of breakfasting in a city which neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy way. They decided at last, in view of the early depart- ure of the train, and the probability that they would be more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast at the station, and thither they went and took placea t one of the many tables within, where they seemed A DAY'S RAILROADING. 81 to have been expected only by the flies. The wait- ress plainly had not looked for them, and for a time found their presence so incredible that she would not acknowledge the rattling that Basil was obliged bo make on his glass. Then it appeared that the cook would not believe in them, and he did not send them, till they were quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee, the oily slices of fugacious potatoes slipping about hi 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-journeyers looked at each other with eyes of sad amaze. They bowed themselves for a moment to the viands, and then by an equal impulse refrained. They were sufficiently young, they were happy, they were hungry ; nature is great and strong, but art is greater, and before these triumphs of the cook at the Albany depot ap- petite succumbed. By a terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor hi their cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the charac- ter and history of the materials of that breakfast. Presently Isabel paused, played a little with he* knife, and, after a moment, looked up at her hus- band with an arch regard and said : " I was just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where our train once stopped for break- * 82 THEIB WEDDING JOUKNEY. fast. I remember the freshness and brightness of everything on the little tables, the plates, the napkins, the gleaming half-bottles of wine. They seemed to have been preparing that breakfast foi as from the beginning of time, and we were hardly seated before they served us with great cups of caf6- aii'lait, and the sweetest rolls and butter ; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and po- tatoes, such potatoes ! Dear me, how little I ate of it ! I wish, for once, I'd had your appetite, Basil ; I do indeed." She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, de- spite the tragical contrast her words had suggested, Basil finally joined. So much amazement had probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted in that place ; but their lightness did not at all commend them. The waitress had not liked it from the first, and had served them with reluc- tance ; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon them as if he believed them about to escape without payment. Here, then, they had en- forced a great fact of travelling, that people who serve the public are kindly and pleasant in propor- tion as they serve it well. The unjust and the inefficient have always that consciousness of evil which will not let a man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful. Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact. There was already such heat from without, even at eight o'clock in the morning, that A DAY'S BAILBOADINa. 88 they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly* took their places in the train, which had been made up for departure. They had delib- erately rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite com- fortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to vie-w the scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open win- dow to make the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil pio- turesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any con- siderable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a graz- ing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River rippling down through all, and at frequent intervals the life of the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazy boats that seem not to stir, and the horses that the train passes with a whirl, and leaves slowly tepping forward and swiftly slipping backward. There are farms that had once, or still have, the romance to them of being Dutch farms, if there is any romance in that, and one conjectures a Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain. Spaces of woodland here and there dapple th 84 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. slopes, and the cozy 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 landscape. I stop at the farm-yard gates, and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning's work and have lei- sure to be knitting or sewing ; or if there are no old ladies, with decent caps upon their gray hair, then I do not complain if the drink is brought me by some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of Wash- ington Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes an at- titude of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I have done drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as I lounge through the barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in the sun before the gate. At all the places, I have the peo- ple keep bees, and, in the garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a great bed in which the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of delicate ppray hang- A DAY'S BAILROADING. 85 ing o\er it. I walk unmolested through the fann- er's tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of bis voluble 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 ia not true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hay- field, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal be- eide that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only because they are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his anatomical interest. The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the rudder swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can step on. She is laden with flour from the valley of the Genesee, and may have started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a fiery-haired lady of imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I explore, is plainly furnished with a cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane language is allowed on board ; and so, in a life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide impercepti- bly down the canal, unvexed by the far-off futuie 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 io not pretend that my wedding- journey era were & 86 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY. They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape ; they invited themselves to be reminded of passages of European travel by it ; and they placed villas and castles and palaces upon all the eligible build- ing-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 noth- ing of the barbarous regions beyond the borders of her native province. She proved a bewilder- ing labyrinth of error concerning the events which Basil mentioned ; and she had never even heard of the massacres by the French and Indians at Sche- nectady, which he in his boyhood had known so vividly that he was scalped every night in his dreams, and woke up in the morning expecting to see marks of the tomahawk on the head-board. So, failing at last to extract any sentiment from the scenes without, they turned their faces from the window, and looked about them for amusement within the car. It was in all respects an ordinary earful of hu- man beings, and it was perhaps the more worthy to be studied on that account. As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sin- cere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him is A DAY'S RAILROADING. 87 hii habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very pre- cious ; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and a brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life and inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by his stinted inspirations, to share hia foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse selfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world, if you do not re- fuse to be amused ; and our friends were very will- ing to be entertained. They delighted in the pre- cise, thick-fingered old ladies who bought sweet apples of the boys come aboard with baskets, and who were so long in finding the right change, that our travellers, leaping in thought with the boys from the moving train, felt that they did so at the peril of their lives. Then they were interested in people who went out and found their friends wait- ing for them, or else did not find them, and wan- dered disconsolately up and down before the coun- try stations, carpet-bag in hand ; in women who came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands with or sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got wats for them, and placed their bags or their ba- bies in their laps, and turned for a nod at the door ; hi young ladies who were seen to places by young men (the latter seemed not to care if the did go off with them), and then threw up 88 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. their windows and talked with girl-friendu on the platform without, till the train began to move, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and moist red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it, and could not calm themselves to the dull level of the travel around them ; in the conductor, coldly and inacces- sibly vigilant, as he went hia rounds, reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his head from time to time, and listened with a faint, sarcastic smile to the questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some information out of him ; in the train-boy, who passed through on his many errands with prize candies, gum-drops, pop-corn, papers and magazines, and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impar- tiality, or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernat- ural perception of character in those who received them. A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as well as the traits common to all railway travel ; and our friends decided that this was not a very well-dressed company, and would contrast with the people on an express-train between Boston and New York to no better advan- tage than these would show beside the average passengers between London and Paris. And it A DAY'S RAILROADING. 89 eems true that on a westering line, the blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into increasing informality of cos- tume. I speak of the undressful sex alone : woman, wherever she is, appears in the last attainable ef- fects of fashion, which are now all but telegraphic and universal But most of the passengers here were men, and they were plainly of the free-and easy West rather than the dapper East. They wore faces thoughtful with the problem of buying cheap and selling dear, and they could be known by their silence from the loquacious, acquaintance- making way-travellers. In these, the mere coming aboard seemed to beget an aggressively confidential nood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any means of relieving their ennui ; or they felt that they might here indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography, so dear to all of us ; or else, in view of the many possible catastrophes, they desired to leave some little memory of themselves behind. At any rate, whenever the train stopped, the wed- ding-journeyers caught fragments of the personal histories of their fellow-passengers which had been rehearsing to those that sat next the narrators. It was no more than fair that these should somewhat magnify themselves, and put the best complexion on their actions and the worst upon their suffer- ings ; that ther should all appear the luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people 90 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEtf. that ftver were, and should all have made or lost the most money. There was a prevailing desire among them to make out that they came from or were going to some very large place ; and our friends fancied an actual mortification in the face of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope (or some other insignificant classical station, in the ancient Greek and Roman part of New York State), after having listened to the life of a some- what rustic-looking person who had described him- self as belonging near New York City. Basil also found diversion in the tender cou- ples, who publicly comported themselves as if in a sylvan solitude, and, as it had been on the bank of some umbrageous stream, far from the ken of en- vious or unsympathetic eyes, reclined upon each other's shoulders and slept ; but Isabel declared that this behavior was perfectly indecent. She granted, of course, that they were foolish, innocent people, who meant no offense, and did not feel guilty of an impropriety, but she said that this sort of thing was a national reproach. If it were merely rustic lovers, she should not care so much ; but you saw people who ought to know better, well-dressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotion in the face of the world, and going to sleep on each other's shoulders on every railroad train. It was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really in- famous. Before she would allow herself to do such a thing she would well, she hardly knew what A DAY'S RAILROADING. 91 she would not do ; she would have a divorce, at any rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh at it ; and he would make her hate him if he kept on. From the seat behind their own they were now made listeners to the history of a ten weeks' ty- phoid fever, from the moment when the narrator noticed that he had not felt very well for a day or two back, and all at once a kind of shiver took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly insen- sible, and could eat nothing but a little pounded ice and his wife a small woman, too used to lift him back and forth between the bed and sofa like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half the time whether he was dead or alive. This his- tory, from which not the smallest particular or the least significant symptom of the case was omitted, occupied an hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for the entertainment of one who had been five minutes before it began a stranger to the his- torian. At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailed forth in accents of desperation the words, " O, disgusting ! " The monotony of the narrative in the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat of the day, had lulled her into slumbers from which she awoke at the stopping of the train, to find her head resting tenderly upon her husband's shoulder. She confronted his merriment with eyes of mournful rebuke ; but as she could not find him, oy the harshest construction, in the least to blame, she was silent. 92 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. " Never mind, dear, never mind," he coaxed, " you were really not responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune, whatever you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare say it is sheer, disgraceful affection But see that ravishing placard, swinging from the roof : ' This train stops twenty minutes for dinner at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have anything edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could dine at the Albany station, even." In a little while they found themselves in an airy, comfortable dining-room, eating a dinner, which it seemed to them France in the flush of her prosperity need not have blushed to serve ; for if it wanted a little in the last graces of art, it redeemed A DAY'S RAILROADING. 98 itself In abundance, variety, and wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famishing passenger stood a beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and jacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindliness and grace which make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his calling, which disenthrall it of servility, and constitute him your eager host, not your me- nial, for the moment. From table to table passed a calm- ing influence in the person of the proprietor, who, as he .took his richly earned money, checked the rising fears of the guests by re- peated proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he would give them due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beak and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon every- thing in reach, remained to eat like Christians; and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman, wrho wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made ft good dinner in spite of himself. l O Basil, Basil ! " cried Isabel, when the train was again in motion, " have we really dined once 94 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. 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 ; hon- esty and courtesy go together ; and wherever they give you outrageous things to eat, they add in- digestible insults. Basil, dear, don't be jealous; I shall never meet him again ; but I'm in love with that black waiter at our table. I never saw such perfect manners, such a winning and affectionate politeness. He made me feel that every mouthful I ate was a personal favor to him. What a com- plete gentleman ! There ought never to be a white waiter. None but negroes are able to render their service a pleasure and distinction to you." So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness to be satisfied, a homage perhaps beyond its desert to the good dinner and the decent service of it. But here they erred in the right direction, and I find nothing more admirable in theii behavior through- out a wedding journey which certainly had its trials, than their willingness to make the very best of whatever would suffer itself to be made any- thing at all of. They celebrated its pleasures with magnanimous excess, they passed over its griefs with a wise forbearance. That which they found the most difficult of management was the want of incident for the most part of the time ; and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typica* in this respect I even imagine that ideal readei A DAY'S RAILROADING. 95 for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their love, which they were never tired of hearing as they severally knew it. Let it not be a reproach to human nature or to me if I say that there was something in the com- fort of having well dined which now touched the springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that they had never so rejoiced in these tender remi- niscences. They had planned to stop over at Rochester till the morrow, that they might arrive at Niagara by daylight, and at Utica they had suddenly resolved to make the rest of the day's journey in a drawing- room car. The change gave them an added reason for content ; and they realized how much they had previously sacrificed to the idea of travelling in the most American manner, without achieving it after all, for this seemed a touch of Americanism beyond the old-fashioned car. They reclined in luxury upon the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs ; they surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of the flying-parlor in which they sat, or turned their contented regard through the broad plate-glasa windows upon the landscape without. They said that none but Americans or enchanted princes in the "Arabian Nights" ever travelled in such state ; 96 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and when the stewards of the car came round suc- cessively with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret- punches, they felt a heightened assurance that they were either enchanted princes or Americans. There were more ladies and more fashion than in the other cars ; and prettily dressed children played about on the carpet ; but the general appearance of the passengers hardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere ; and they were plainly in that car because they were of the American race, which finds nothing too good for it that its money can buy. V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. THEY knew none of the ho- tels in Roches- ter, and they had chosen a certain one in reliance upon their hand- book. When they named it, there stepped forth a porter of an incredibly cordial and pleasant countenance, who took their travelling-bags, and led them to the omnibus. As they were his only passengers, the porter got inside with them, and seeing their interest in the streets through which they rode, he descanted in a strain of cheerful pride upon the city's prosperity and character, and gave the names of the people who lived in the finer houses, just as if it had been an Old-World town, and he some eager historian expecting reward for his comment upon :t. He cast quite a glamour 98 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. over Rochester, so that in passing a body of water, bordered by houses, and overlooked by odd bal- conies and galleries, and crossed in the distance by a bridge upon which other houses were built, they boldly declared, being at their wit's end for a com- parison, and taken with the unhoped-for pictur- esqueness, that it put them in mind of Verona. Thus they reached their hotel in almost a spirit of foreign travel, and very willing to verify the pleas- ant porter's assurance that they would like it, for everybody liked it ; and it was with a sudden sink- ing of the heart that Basil beheld presiding over the register the conventional American hotel clerk. He was young, he had a neat mustache and well- brushed hair ; jeweled studs sparkled in his shirt- front, and rings on his white hands ; a gentle disdain of the travelling public breathed from his person in the mystical odors of Ihlang ihlang. He did not lift his haughty head to look at the way- farer who meekly wrote his name in the register ; he did not answer him when he begged for a cool room ; he turned to the board on which the keys hung, and, plucking one from it, slid it towards Basil on the marble counter, touched a bell for a call-boy, whistled a bar of Offenbach, and as he wrote the number of the room against Basil's name, said to a friend lounging near him, as if resuming a conversation, " Well, she 's a mighty pooty gul, tny way, Chawley ! " When I reflect that this was a type of the Hotel THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 99 olerk throughout the United States, that behind mraumbered registers at this moment he is snub- bing travellers into the dust, and that they are suf- fering and perpetuating him, I am lost in wonder at the national meekness. Not that I am one to re- 100 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. fuse the humble pie his jeweled fingers offer me. Abjectly I take my key, and creep off up stain after the call-boy, and try to give myself the gen- teel air of one who has not been stepped upon. But I think homicidal things all the same, and I rejoice that in the safety of print I can cry out against the despot, whom I have not the presence to defy. " You vulgar and cruel little soul," I say, and I imagine myself breathing the words to his teeth, " why do you treat a weary stranger with this ignominy ? I am to pay well for what I get, and I shall not complain of that. But look at me, and own my humanity; confess by some civil action, by some decent phrase, that I have rights and that they shall be respected. Answer my proper ques- tions ; respond to my fair demands. Do not slide my key at me ; do not deny me the poor politeness of a nod as you give it in my hand. I am not your equal ; few men are ; but I shall not presume upon your clemency. Come, I also am human ! " Basil found that, for his sin in asking for a cool room, the clerk had given them a chamber into which the sun had been shining the whole after- noon ; but when his luggage had been put in it seemed useless to protest, and like a true American, like you, like me, he shrank from asserting himself. When the sun went down it would be cool enough ; and they turned their thoughts to supper, not ven- turing to hope that, as it proved, the handsome stork was the sole blemish of the house. THE ENCHANTED CITT, AND BEYOND. 101 Isabel viewed -with innocent surprise the evi- dences of luxury afforded by all the appointments of a hotel so far west of Boston, and they both be- gan to feel that natural ease and superiority which an inn always inspires in its guests, and which our great hotels, far from impairing, enhance in flatter- ing degree ; in fact, the clerk once forgotten, I pro- test, for my own part, I am never more conscious of my merits and riches in any other place. One has there the romance of being a stranger and a mystery to every one else, and lives in the alluring possibil- ity of not being found out a most ordinary person. They were so late in coming to the supper-room, that they found themselves alone in it. At the door they had a bow from the head- waiter, who ran be- fore them and drew out chairs for them at a table, and signaled waiters to serve them, first laying be- fore them with a gracious flourish the bill of fare. A force of servants flocked about them, as if to con- test the honor of ordering their supper; one set upon the table a heaping vase of strawberries, an- other flanked it with flagons of cream, a third ac- companied it with cates of varied flavor and device ; a fourth obsequiously smoothed the table-cloth ; a fifth, the youngest of the five, with folded arms stood by and admired the satisfaction the rest wrere giving. When these had been dispatched for steak, for broiled white-fish of the lakes, noblest and delicatest of the fish that swim, for broiled chicken, for fried potatoes, for muffins, for whatever 102 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. the lawless fancy, and ravening appetites of th wayfarers could suggest, this fifth waiter remained to tempt them to further excess, and vainly pro- posed some kind of eggs, fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, or omelette. " O, you're sure, dearest, that this isn't a vision of fairy-land, which will vanish presently, and leave us empty and forlorn ? " plaintively murmured Isa- bel, as the menial train reappeared, bearing the gupper they had ordered and set it smoking down. Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon her face, and she let fall her knife and fork. " You don't think, Basil," she faltered, " that they could have found out we're a bridal party, and that they're serving us so magnificently because be- cause O, I shall be miserable every moment we're here ! " she concluded desperately. She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a woman with so much broiled white-fish on her plate, and such a banquet array about her ; and her husband made haste to reassure her. " You're still demoralized, Isabel, by our sufferings at the Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings we enjoy, though I should be sorry to undervalue them. I suspect it 's the custom to use people well at this hotel ; or if we are singled out for uncommon favor, I think I can explain the cause. It has been dia- tovered by the register that we are from Boston, and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection, *nd homage which the name everywhere command* THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 108 ft 's our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and moral virtue of Boston. This sup- per is not a tribute to you as a bride, but as a Bos- tonian." It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it served. It kindled the local pride of Isabel to self- defense, and in the distraction of the effort she for- got her fears ; she returned with renewed appetite to the supper, and in its excellence they both let fall their dispute, which ended, of course, in Basil's abject confession that Boston was the best place in the world, and nothing but banishment could make him live elsewhere, and gave themselves up, as usual, to the delight of being just what and where they were. At last, the natural course brought them to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter approached from the corner of the table at which he stood, to place the vase near them, he did not re- tire at once, but presently asked if they were from the West. Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were from the East. He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if he went further, but took heart, then, and asked, " Don't you think this is a pretty nice hotel " hastily adding as a concession of the probable exist- ance of much finer things at the East " for a tmall hotel ? " They imagined this waiter as new to his station in life, as perhaps just risen to it from some country 104 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. tavern, and unable to repress his exultation in what seemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed to have invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his soul ; it was what might have happened 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 ho- tel ; one of the best I ever saw, East or West, in Europe or America." They rose and left the room, and were bowed out by the head-waiter. " How perfectly idyllic I " cried Isabel. " Is this Rochester, New York, or is it some vale of Arcady? Let 's go out and see." They walked out into the moonlit city, up and down streets that seemed very stately and fine, amidst a glitter of shop-window lights ; and then, less of their own motion than of mere error, they quitted the business quarter, and found themselves in a quiet avenue of handsome residences, the Beacon Street of Rochester, whatever it was called. They said it was a night and a place for lovers, for none but lovers, for lovers newly plighted, and they made believe to bemoan themselves that, hold each other dear as they would, the exaltation, the thrill the glory of their younger love was gone. Some of the houses had gardened spaces about them, from which stole, like breaths of sweetest and saddest re- THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 106 gret, the perfume of midsummer flowers, the despair of the rose for the bud. A s they passed a certain house, a song fluttered out of the open win- dow and ceased, the piano warbled at the final rush of fingers over its chords, and they saw her with her fingers resting lightly on the keys, and hei graceful head lifted to look into his ; they saw hirr. with his arm yet stretched across to the leaves oi music he had been turning, and his face lowered to meet her gaze. " Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there ! " " And if they knew that we, on our wedding journey, stood outside, would not they wish it was they, here? " " I suppose so, dearest, and yet, once-upon-a- time was sweet. Pass on ; and let us see what charm we shall find next in this enchanted city." " Yes, it is an enchanted city to us," mused Basil, aloud, as they wandered on, " and all strange cities are enchanted. What is Rochester to the Roches- terese ? A place of a hundred thousand people, aa we read in our guide, an immense flour interest, a great railroad entreptit, an unrivaled nursery trade, a university, two commercial colleges, three collegi- ate institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I dare say any respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over his city. But Rochester is for us, who don't know it at all, a city of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over piano-fortes, of a palatial hotel with 106 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY. pastoral waiters and portera, 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 American woman should be proud of distresses me. Have you really, then, never heard of the man who in- vented the saying, ' Some things can be done aa well as others,' and proved it by jumping over Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this belief, he attempted the leap of the Geuesee Falls. The leap was easy enough, but the coming up again was another matter. He failed in that. It was i-he one thing that could not be done as well aa others." " Dreadful ! " said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. " But what has all that to do with Rochester ? " " Now, my "dear ! You don't mean to say you didn't know that the Genesee Falls were at Roch- ester ? Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we'ie within ten minutes' walk of them now." " Then walk to them at once ! " cried Isabel, wholly unabashed, and in fact unable to see what he had to be ashamed of. " Actually, I believe you would have allowed me to leave Rochester without telling me the falls were here, if you hadn't happened to think of Sam Patch." THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BETOND. 107 Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chiel object of their journey had been to visit the scene of Sam Patch's fatal exploit, and she drew Basil with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroad station, beyond which he said were the falls. Presently, after threading their way among a multitude of locomotives, with and without trains attached, that backed and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatiently on every side, they passed through the station to a broad planking above the river on the other side, and thence, after encounter of more locomotives, they found, by dint of much asking, a street winding up the hill-side to the left, and leading to the German Bierhaus that givea access to the best view of the cataract. The Americans have characteristically bordered the river with manufactures, making every drop work its passage to the brink ; while the Germans have as characteristically made use of the beauty left over, and have built a Bierhaus where they may regale both soul and sense in the presence of the cataract. Our travellers might, in another mood and place, have thought it droll to arrive at that sublime spectacle through a Bierhaus, but in this enchanted city it seemed to have a peculiar fitness. A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival space occupied by many tables, each of which was sur- rounded by a group of clamorous Germans of either *ex and every age, with taU beakers of beaded lagei 108 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. f before them, and slim flasks of Rhenish ; overhead flamed the gas in globes of varicolored glass ; the THE ENCHANTED CITY,, AND BEYOND. 109 walls were painted like those of such haunts in the fatherland ; and the wedding-journeyers were fain to linger on their way, to dwell upon that scene of honest enjoyment, to inhale the mingling odors of beer and of pipes, and of the pungent cheeses in which the children of the fatherland delight. Amidst the inspiriting clash of plates and glasses, the rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse rush of gutturals, they could catch the words Franzosen, Kaiser, 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 ex- change of joy, arms tossed abroad in wild congrat- ulation, and health-pouring goblets of beer lifted in air. Then they stepped into the moonlight again, and heard only the solemn organ stops of the cata- ract. Through garden-ground they were led by the little maid, their guide, to a small pavilion that stood on the edge of the precipitous shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls. As they entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers, passed out, and they were left alone with that sublime presence. Something of definiteness was to be desired in the spectacle, but there was ample compensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgence and the dense unluminous shadows of the moonshine invested it. The light touched all the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe away from the brink of the cataract, and then de- 110 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. perately breaking and perishing to fall, the white disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the vast and deep ravine through which the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of % snowy compactness, now to disperse into their multitudi- nous particles and hang like some vaporous cloud from the cliff. Every moment renewed the vision of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape ; and its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the great town on the other shore, the station with its bridge and its trains, the mills that supplied their feeble little needs from the cataract's strength. At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the middle of the fall, from which Sam Patch had made his fatal leap ; but Isabel refused to admit that tragical figure to the honors of her emotions. " I don't care for him!" she said fiercely. "Patch I What a name to be linked in our thoughts with this superb cataract." " Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust. It's as good a name as Leander, to my thinking, and it was immortalized in support of a great idea, the feasibility of all things; while Leander's has come down to us as that of the weak victim of a passion. We shall never have a poetry of our own till wo get over this absurd reluctance from facts, till we make the ideal embrace and include the real, till we consent to face the music in our simple com- mon names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jonet THE EHCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. Ill into a tragedy. The Germans are braver than we, and in them you find facts and dreams continually blended and confronted. Here is a fortunate illus- tration. The people we met coming out of this pavilion were lovers, and they had been here senti- mentalizing on this superb cataract, as you call it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be named. No doubt they had been quoting Uhland or some other of their romantic poets, perhaps sing- ing some of their tender German love-songs, the tenderest, unearthliest love-songs in the world. At the same time they did not disdain the matter-of- fact corporeity in which their sentiment was en- shrined ; they fed it heartily and abundantly with the banquet whoee 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 brimming 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 suppose they scorned the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed upon the falls? On the contrary, I've no doubt that he recalled to her the ballad which a poet of their language made about him. It used to go the rounds of the German newspapers, and I translated it, a long while ago, when I thought that I too was in Arkadien geboren. 112 THEIK WEDDING JOURNET. "'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. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 118 " ' Forever it hovers and poises Aloof in the moonlit air ; As light as mist from the rapids, As heavy as nightmare. " ' In anguish I cry to the people, The long-since vanished hosts ; I see them stretch forth in answer, The helpless hands of ghosts.' I once met the poet who wrote this. He drank too much beer." " I don't see that he got in the name of Sam Patch, after all," said Isabel. " O yes, he did ; but I had to yield to our taste, and where he said, ' Springt der Sam Patsch kiihn and 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 veay toward Niagara, the heat had already set in with the effect of ordinary midsummer's heat at high noon. The car into which they got had come the past night from Albany, and had an air of al- * 114 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. most conscious shabbiness, griminess, and over-use. The seats were covered with cinders, which also crackled under foot. Dust was on everything, especially the persons of the crumpled and weary passengers of overnight. Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lighten the spiritual gloom , and presently they sank into the common bodily wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated, and as it drew nearer Buffalo they knew the con- ductor to have abandoned himself to that blackest of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick lateral motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew hi and quick gusts caught away the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling, and all the faces on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and damp with apathetic misery. The incidents were in harmony with the abject physical tone of the company. There was a quarrel between a thin, shrill-voiced, highly dressed, much- bedizened Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old woman, half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparent ears that stood out from his head like the handles of a jar, on the other side, about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept filled with packages on the pretense that it was engaged. It was a loud and fierce quarre enough, but it won no sort of favor ; and when fchf THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 115 Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no lady, and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied, " Highly complimen- tary, I must say," there was no sign of relief or other acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that there had been a quarrel. There was a little more interest taken hi the mis- fortune of an old purblind German and his son, who were found by the conductor to be a few hun- dred miles out of the direct course to their destina- tion, and were with some trouble and the aid of ail Americanized fellow-countryman made aware of the fact. The old man then fell back in the prevailing apathy, and the child naturally cared nothing. By and by came the unsparing train-boy on his rounds, bestrewing the passengers successively with papers, magazines, fine-cut tobacco, and packages of candy. He gave the old man a package of candy, and passed on. The German took it as the bounty of the Amer- ican people, oddly manifested in a situation where he could otherwise have had little proof of their care. He opened it and was sharing it with his son when the train-boy came back, and metallically, like a part of the machinery, demanded, " Ten cents ! " The German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated, " Ten cents ! ten cents ! " with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled. When it had passed through the alien's Head that he was to pay for this national gift and he took with his tremulous fingers from the recesses of his pocket-book a ten- 116 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. oent note and handed it to his tormentor, some ol the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other with eyer 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, shabby ruffian before. Good heavens ! To think of our immortal souls being moved to mirth by such a thing as this, so stupid, so barren of all reason of laughter. And then the cruelty of it ! What ferocious imbeciles we are ! Whom have I married ? A woman with neither heart nor brain ! " " O Basil, dear, pay him back the money do." " I can't. That 's the worst of it. He 's money enough, and might justly take offense. What breaks my heart is that we could have the depravity to smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who supposed he had at last met with an act of pure kindness. It's a thing to weep over. Look at these grinning wretches ! What a fiendish effect their smiles have, through their cinders and sweat ! O, it 's the terrible weather ; the despotism of the dust and heat ; the wickedness of the infernal air. What a squalid and loathsome company ! " At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found tliemselves with several hours' tune on their hands before the train started for Niagara, and in the first moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into say THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 117 Ing, " Don't you think we'd have done better to go directly from Rochester to the Falls, instead of com- ing this way ? " " Why certainly. I didn't propose coming thij way." " I know it, dear. I was only asking," said Isa- bel, meekly. " But I should think you'd have gen- erosity enough to take a little of the blame, when 1 wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you." This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when Basil made his first visit to Niagara, he had approached from the west by way of Buffalo ; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged' his having existed before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his past, was re- solved to draw near the great cataract by no other route. She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his hard-heartedness. The sigh touched him, and he suggested a carriage-ride through the city ; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had been thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was taken by surprise. " If ever we leave Boston," she said, " we will not live at Rochester, as I thought last night ; we'll come to Buffalo." She found that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the ug- liness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, with no 118 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. line between sharper than that which divides drew* ing from dreaming. But the color was the most charming thing, that delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of the sea-blue, but infinitely softer and lovelier. The nearer expanses rippled with dainty waves, silver and lucent; the further levels made, with the sun-dimmed summer sky, a vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the white sails of ships, and stained by the smoke of steamers. " Take me away now," said Isabel, when her eyes had feasted upon all this, " and don't let me see another thing till I get to Niagara. Nothing less sublime is worthy the eyes that have beheld such beauty." However, on the way to Niagara she consented to glimpses of the river which carries the waters of the lake for their mighty plunge, and which shows itself very nobly from time to time as you draw toward the cataract, with wooded or cultivated isl- ands, and rich farms along its low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye the shining white of the rapids, a hint, no more, of the splenior and aw- fulnoss to be revealed. VT. NIAGARA. As the train stopped, Isabel's heart beat with a child-like ex- ultation, as I believe every one's heart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara. She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, that she heard the roar of the cata- ract, and now, when she alighted from the car, she was sure she should have heard it but for the vulgar little noises that attend the ar- rival of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere else. " Never mind, dearest ; you shall be stunned with it before you leave," promised her husband ; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode through the quaint streets of the village, where it remains a question whether the lowliness of the shops and pri- vate houses makes the hotels look so vast, or the 120 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. oigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings. The immense caravansaries swelling up from among fche 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 \ery conscious of their disproportion to the accommoda- tions of the smallest. They were the sole occu- pants of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be received at their hotel with a burst of min- strelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt that a single stringed instrument of some timid note would have been enough ; and Basil was go- ing to express his own modest preference for a jew's-harp, when the music ceased with a sudden clash of the cymbals. But the next moment it burst out with fresh sweetness, and in alighting they perceived that another omnibus had turned the corner and was drawing up to the pillared por- tico of the hotel. A small family dismounted, and the feet of the last had hardly touched the pave- ment when the music again ended as abruptly aa those flourishes of trumpets that usher player-kings upon the stage. Isabel could not help laughing at this melodious parsimony. " I hope they don't let on the cataract and shut it off in this frugal style ; do they, Basil ? " she asked, and passed jesting through a pomp of unoccupied porters and call- boys. Apparently there were not many people flopping at this hotel, or else they were all out NIAGARA. 121 looking at the Falls or confined to their rooms. However, our travellers took in the almost weird emptiness of the place with their usual gratitude to fortune for all queerness in life, and followed to Ihf pleasant quarters assigned them. There was time before supper for a glance at the cataract, and aftei a brief toilet they sallied out again upon the hol- iday street, with its parade of gay little shops, and thence passed into the grove beside the Falls, enjoy- ing at every instant their feeling of arrival at a sub- lime destination. In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank with Rome, the metropolis of history and religion ; with Venice, the chief city of sentiment and fan- tasy. In either you are at once made at home by a perception of its greatness, in which there is no quality of aggression, as there always seems to be in minor places as well as in minor men, and you gratefully accept its sublimity as a fact in no way contrasting with your own insignificance. Our friends were beset of course by many car- riage-drivers, whom they repelled with the kindly firmness of experienced travel. Isabel even felt a compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Ni- agara so much as to have forgotten that the first time one must see it alone or only with the next oi friendship. She was voluble in her pity of Basil that it was not as new to him as to her, till be- tween the trees they saw a white cloud of spray, ahot through and through with sunset, rising, rising, 122 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten down by the diapason of the cataract. I am not sure but the first emotion on viewing Niagara is that of familiarity. Ever after, its strangeness increases ; but in that earliest moment, when you stand by the side of the American fall, and take in so much of the whole as your glance can compass, an impression of having seen it often before is certainly very vivid. This may be an effect of that grandeur which puts you at your ease in its presence ; but it also undoubtedly re- sults in part from lifelong acquaintance with every variety of futile picture of the scene. You have its outward form clearly in your memory ; the shores, the rapids, the islands, the curve of the Falls, and the stout rainbow with one end resting on their top and the other lost in the mists that rise from the gulf beneath. On the whole I do not account this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The surprise is none the less a surprise because it is kept till the last, and the marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at once through a single sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as if Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred to win your heart with her beauty ; and so Isabel, who was instinctively prepared for the reverse, suffered a vague disappointment, for a litfe in- stant, as she looked along the verge from the water that caressed the shore at her feet before it flung Itself down, to the wooded point that divides the NIAGARA. 123 American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which ihowed 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 pro- digious presence does make a solitude and silence round every spirit worthy to perceive it, and it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that the rocks and pebbles in the water's edge, and the weeds and grasses that nod above it, have a value far beyond that of such common things elsewhere. In all the aspects of Niagara there seems a grave simplicity, which is perhaps a reflection of the spectator's soul for once utterly dismantled of affec- tation and convention. In the vulgar reaction from this, you are of course as trivial, if you like, at Niagara, as anywhere. Slowly Isabel became aware that the sacred grove beside the fall was profaned by some very common presences indeed, that tossed bits of stone and sticks into the consecrated waters, and strug- gled for handkerchiefs and fans, and here and there put their arms about each other's waists, and made a show of laughing and joking. They were a pic- nic party of ru le, silly folks of the neighborhood, tnd she stood pondering them hi sad wonder if anything could be worse, when she heard a voioe 124 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY. Baying to Basil, " Take you next, Sir ? Plenty of light yet, and the wind's down the river, so the spray won't interfere. Make a capital picture of you ; falls in the background." It was the local photographer urging them to succeed the young couple he had just posed at the brink : the gentle- man was sitting down, with his legs crossed and his hands elegantly disposed; the lady was standing at his side, with one arm thrown lightly across his shoulder, while with the other hand she thrust his cane into the ground ; you could see it was going to be a splendid photograph. Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trust- ing as usual to his sympathy for perception of her train of thought, " Well, I'll never try to be high- strung again. But shouldn't you have thought, dearest, that i might expect to be high-strung with success at Niagara if anywhere ? " She passively followed him into the long, queer, downward-slop- ing edifice on the border of the grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood ready, and descended the incline. Emerging into the light again, she found herself at the foot of the fall by whose top she had just stood. At first she was glad there were other people down there, as if she and Basil were not enough to bear it alone, and she could almost have spoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasols and impertinent little boots, whom their attendant hus- bands were helping over the sharp and slippery NIAGARA. 185 rocka, so bare beyond the spray, so green and mossy within the fall of mist. But in another 126 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. breath she forgot them, as she looked on that diz- zied sea, hurling itself from the high summit m huge white knots, and breaks and masses, and plunging into the gulf beside her, while it sent continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and crawled away in vast eddies, with somehow a look of human terror, bewilderment, and pain. It was bathed in snowy vapor to its crest, but now and then heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of the Falls almost as far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwards how they were able to make use of but one sense at a time, and how when they strove to take in the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear it; but as soon as they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in them vibrated to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it. They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, and of a tendency of each to pal- ter with the things perceived. The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality, and now be- held the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of carven marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as would hold them to- gether ; and again they could not discern if this course were from above or from beneath, whether the water rose from the abyss or dropped from the height. The ear could give the brain no assurance of the sound that filled it, and whether it were NIAGARA. 127 great or little ; the prevailing softness of the cata- ract's tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of pro- digious force or of prodigious volume. It was only when the sight, so idle in its own behalf, came to the aid of the other sense, and showed them the mute movement of each other's lips, that they dimly appreciated the depth of sound that involved them. " I think y DU might have been high-strung there, for a second or two," said Basil, when, ascending the incline, he could make himself heard. " We will try the bridge next." Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls they have in late years woven a web of wire high in air, and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of all the bridges made with hands it seems the light- est, most ethereal ; it is ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers like a garland. It is worthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Ni- agara, and to show the traveller the vast spec- tacle, from the beginning of the American Fall to the farthest limit of the Horse-Shoe, with all the awful pomp of the rapids, the solemn darkness of Jie 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 grovea which keep the village back from the shores of the L28 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. river on the American side, and greatly help the Bight-seer's pleasure in the place. The exquisite structure, which sways so tremulously from its towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth where its cables sink into the ground, is to other bridges what the blood horse is to the common breed of roadsters ; and now they felt its sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them as they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their sympathy with the bridge's trepidation was too great for unalloyed delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there ; and afterwards, at least, they would not have had their airy pa,th 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 up- ward, 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 undercur rents forever unfolding themselves upon the surface with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all round with faint lines of white, where the air that filled the water freed itself in foam. What had beec NIAGARA. 129 clear green on the face of the cataract was here more like rich verd-antique, 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 ever- greens that climb from ledge to ledge, till they point their speary tops above the crest of bluffs. In front, where tumbled rocks and expanses of naked clay varied the gloomier and gayer green, sprung those spectral mists; and through them loomed out, in its manifold majesty, Niagara, with the seemingly immovable white Gothic screen of the American Fall, and the green massive curve of the Horse-Shoe, solid and simple and calm as an Egyptian wall ; while behind this, with their white and black expanses broken by dark foliaged little isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed down be- tween their heavily wooded shores. The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the sight ; and then, look- ing back from the shore to the spot where they had stood, they felt relieved that unreality should pos- sess itself of all, and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air like a filmy web, scarce more pass- able than the rainbow that flings its arch above th mists. On the portico of the hotel they found half a 130 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. itcore of gentlemen smoking, and creating togethei 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 stand- ing 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 bus- tle, as he provided a newly arrived guest with a room. Our pair took in these traits of solitude and repose with indifference. If the hotel had been thronged with brilliant company, they would have been no more and no less pleased ; and when, after supper, they came into the grand parlor, and found nothing there but a marble-topped centre- table, with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small company of goblets, they sat down perfectly con- tent in a secluded window-seat. They were not een by the three people who entered soon after, and halted hi the centre of the room. " Why, Kitty ! " said one of the two ladies who must be in any travelling-party of three, " this ia more inappropriate to your gorgeous array than the supper-room, even." She who was called Kitty was armed, as for so- NIAGARA. 131 rial conquest, in some kind of airy evening-dress, and was looking round with bewilderment upon that forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a smile, that she had not seen 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 isn't probable that the hotel will fill up overnight ; and I feel personally responsible for this state of things. Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would be so empty? I thought the place was thronged the whole summer long. How do you account for it, Richard ? " The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long- continued discussion elsewhere of the matter in hand, and he said that he had^not been trying to account for it. " Then you don't care for Kitty's pleasure at all, and you don't want her to enjoy herself. Why don't you take some interest in the matter ? " " Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Ni- agara in the most satisfactory way, it wouldn't 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 sum- mer ? Do you suppose it 's not exactly the season ? Didn't you expect there'd be more people ? Per- haps Niagara isn't as fashionable as it used to be.'' 132 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. " It looks something like that." " Well, what under the sun do you think is th 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 ths most fashionable." " I know it. I didn't want to come here for that reason. But fortune favors the brave." " Well, it 's too bad ! Here we've asked Kitty to come to Niagara with us, just to give her a little peep into the world, and^ you've brought us to a hotel where we're " " Monarchs of all we survey," suggested Kitty. " Yes, and start at the sound of our own," added the other lady, helplessly. " Come now, Fanny," said the gentleman, who was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker. " 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 bring- ing you here." " So I do. If you'd let me have my own way without opposition about coming here, I dare ?ay I ihould have gone to the other place. But ne\ei NIAGARA. 133 mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope. She 's your cousin," Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently folded in her lap. She now rose and said that she did not know anything about the other hotel, and perhaps it was just as empty as this. "It can't be. There can't be two hotels so empty," said Fanny. " It don't stand to reason." " If you wish Kitty to see the world so much," said the gentleman, " why don't you take her on to Quebec, with us ? " Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was moving with a listless content about the parlor. "I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she 's only come for the night, and has nothing with her but a few cuffs and collars ! I certainly never heard of anything so absurd before ! " The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its charm upon her, for, after a silence, " I could lend her some things," she said musingly. " But don't speak of it to-night, please. It's too ridiculous. Kitty ! " she called out, and, as the young lady drew near, she continued, " How would you like to go to Quebec, with us ? " " O Fanny ! " cried Kitty, with rapture ; and Jien, with dismay, " How can I ? " " Why, very well, I think. You've got this areas, and your travelling-suit ; and I can lend you whatever you want. Come ! " she added joyously, u let 's go up to your room, and talk it over I " 134 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and the gentleman followed. To their own relief the guiltless eaves-droppers, who found no moment favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy began, issued from their retiracy. " What a remarkable little lady ! " said Basil, eagerly turning to Isabel, for sympathy in his eu joyment of her inconsequence. " Yes, poor thing"! " returned his wife ; " it 's no light matter to invite a young lady to take a jour- ney with you, and promise her all sorts of gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find her on your hands in a desolation like this. It 'a dreadful, I think." Basil stared. " O, certainly," he said. " But what an amusingly illogical little body ! " " I don't understand what you mean, Basil. It was the only thing that she could do, to invite the young lady to go on with them. I wonder her husband had the sense to think of it first. Of course she'll have to lend her things." " And you didn't observe anything peculiar in her way of reaching her conclusions ? " " Peculiar ? What do you mean ? " " 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 ab- surd and impossible." He spoke with heat at being forced to make what he thought a needless explana- tion. NIAGARA. 185 " O ! " said Isabel, after a moment's reflection. " That ! Did you think it so very odd ? " Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man must feel when he begins to perceive that he has married the whole mystifying world of woman- kind in the woman of his choice, and made no an- swer. But to his own soul he said : " I supposed ] had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance. It seems I have been flattering myself." The next morning they went out as they had planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after an early breakfast. As they sauntered through the village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in archi- tecture, they praisefully took in the unalloyed hol- iday character of the place, enjoying equally th lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers and their carriages to let, and the little shops, wit 1 ! nothing but mementos of Niagara, and Indian bead- work, and other trumpery, to sell. Shops so use- less, they agreed, could not be found outside the Palais Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or any- where else in the world but here. They felt them- selves once more a part of the tide of mere sight-see- ing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in other days, and hi an eddy of which their love it- self had opened its white blossom, and lily-like dreamed upon the wave. They were now also part of the great circle of newly wedded bliss, which, involving the whole land during the season of bridal-tours, may be said 136 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of a precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien there, and must discern a certain immodesty in his intrusion. Is it /or his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bow- ing 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 travelling-shawl after one as she springs from the omnibus into her husband's arms ; there are two or three walking back and forth with their new lords upon the porch of the hotel ; at supper they are on every side of him, and he feels himself suffused, as it were, by a roseate atmosphere of youth and love and hope. At breakfast it is the same, and then, in his wanderings about the place he constantly meets them. They are of all manners of beauty, fair and dark, slender and plump, tall and short ; but they are all beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved. Now, if ever in their lives, they are charmingly dressed, and ravishing toilets take the willing eye from the objects of interest. How high the heels of the pretty boots, how small the tender- tinted gloves, how electrical the flutter of the snowy kirts I What is Niagara to these things ? NIAGARA. 187 Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sister- hood to these blessed souls ; but she secretly re- joiced in it, even while she joined Basil in noting their number and smiling at their innocent abandon. She dropped his arm at encounter of the first couple, and walked carelessly at his side ; she made a solemn vow never to take hold of his watcb-chfun in speaking to him ; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting her face very close to his at dinner in studying the bill of fare ; getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the waist. All ascetic resolutions are modified by experiment ; but if Isabel did not rigorously keep these, she is not the less to be praised for having formed them. Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Isl- and, they passed a little group of the Indians still lingering about Niagara, who make the barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and, like the woods and the wild faces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep the cataract remote, and to invest it with the charm of primeval loneliness. This group were women, and they sat motionless on the ground, gmiling sphinx-like over their laps full of bead-work, and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation pon the passers. They wore bright kirtles, and ted shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and dcwn their comfortable persons. A little girl with them was attired in like gayety D color. " What is her name ? " asked Isabel, 188 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. paying for a bead pincushion. " Daisy Smith,' said her mother, in distressingly good English. " But her Indian name ? " " She has none," an- swered the woman, who told Basil that her village numbered five hundred people, and that they were Protestants. While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whom the women saluted musically in their native tongue. This was somewhat con- soling ; but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and it could have been wished that he had not a silk hat on. " Still," said Isabel, as they turned away, " I'm glad he hasn't Lisle-thread gloves, like that chief- tain we saw putting his forest queen on board the train at Oneida. But how shocking that they should be Christians, and Protestants ! It would have been bad enough to have them Catholics. And that woman said that they were increasing. They ought to be fading away." On the bridge, they paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their wild variety, with the white crests of breaking surf, the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools. Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the death- f ol course beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the horror of being cast upon it, and then hurried over the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose mildness they sought refuge from the sight and sound. NIAGARA. 189 There had been rain in the night ; the air was full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twittering birds. Presently they came to a bench set in a corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vista of sunlit foliage, with a mere glearn of the foaming river beyond. As they sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their courtship, began to recite a poem. It was one which had been haunting him since his first sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart in his youth the rhyme of some poor news- paper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clip- ping his name from the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil's memory, rather from the inter- est of the awful fact it recorded, than from any merit of its own ; and now he recalled it with a distinctness that surprised him. AVERT". All night long they heard m the houses beside the shore, Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar, Out of the hell of the rapids as 'twere a lost soul's cries : Heard and could not believe ; and the morning mocked their eyes, Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran Raving round him and past, the visage of a man Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung 1 Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung. 140 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. n. Under thj 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 0, 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 las, And to its proven strength he lashes his weakness fast. Now, for the shore ! But steady, steady, my men, and slow ; Taut, now, the quivering lines ; now slack ; and so, let her go ! Thronging the shores around stands the pitying multitude ; Wan as his own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to brood Heavy upon them, and heavy the silence hangs on all, Save for the rapids' plunge, and the thunder of the fall. But on a sudden thrills from the people still and pale, Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail : Caught on a lurking point of rock it sways and swings, Sport of the pitiless waters, the raft to which he clings. 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 wr 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. through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay Maddeniup- against the gate that ig locked athwart his way. NIAGARA. 141 * No ! we keep the bridge for them that can help him. You, Tell us, who are yon ? " "His brother! " "God help you bothl Pass through." Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud to him, Onto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim ; But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering words are lost As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed- And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope ; Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry, - Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flying free ; Sees, then, the form that, spent with effort and fasting and fear, Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near, Caught in the 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 break- ing the hush that best praised the unknown poet's skill, " it isn't true, is it ? " " Every word, almost, even to the brother's com- ing at the last moment. It 's a very well-known incident," he added, and I am sure the reader whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it. Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide ; nearly every point of interest about the place has killed its man, and there might well be a deeper stain ol crimson than it ever wears hi that pretty bow over- fcrshing the falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy as the lightest- hearted tourist could desire. The abomi nable sav- ages, revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of demoniacal misery and wickedness, whon? the first Jesuits found here two 142 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. hundred years ago ; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these squalid devil-worshippers ; the French planting the fort that yet guards the mouth of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole Niagara country ; the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of France and England ; the awful scene in the con- spiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon the American settlements in the Rev- olution by the savages who prepared their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara ; the battles of Chippewa and of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of the fall ; the sav- age forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and the blazing villages on either shore in the War of 1812, these are the memories of the place, the links in a chain of tragical interest scarcely broken before our time since the white man first beheld the mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect as Basil, in the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories, those precious books that make our meagre past wear something yi the rich romance of old European days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval mar- tyrdom, and then, lacking this light, turned upon NIAGARA. 148 them tKe feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly ex ercised their sympathies upon those who every yeai perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power ; only they refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory ; though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not igno- ble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of the new temple there. Groat Island is marvelously wild for a place vis- ited by so many thousands every year. The shrub- bery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should 144 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. also abound in them ; yet on every embowered Beat, and going to and from all points of interest and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing arms and their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the island, and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran smooth before breaking into the rap- ids ; and as a soft pastoral feature in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the fore- ground of every famous American landscape ; and when I think of the amount of public love-making in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from the parks of Colorado ta the Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nine- teenth century is the golden age, and that we want very little of being a nation of shepherds and shep- herdesses. Our friends returned by the shore of the Cana- dian rapids, having traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now drew slowly neai the Falls again. All parts of the pro- digious pageant have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that constant sub- limity with the sense of discoverers, or rather oi people whose great fortune it is to soe the marveu NIAGARA. 146 in its beginning, and new from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this illu- sicr , while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a wild flutter- ing of their nerves, a rapture with an under-con- aciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and es- cape, when they came to the three little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out into the furious channel. Three pretty suspen- sion-bridges connect them now with the larger isl and, and under each of these flounders a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled woods, planted upon masses of rock ; but they are part of the fas- cination of Niagara which no one resists ; nor could Isabel have been persuaded from exploring them. It wants no courage to do this, but merely submis- sion to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward than the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no human being had oerhaps set foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge with a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence, through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the heaving and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which at every instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil 10 146 THEIR WEDDING JOUliNEY. another revelation of character. Without the &? slightest warning she sank down at the root of a tree, said, with serious composure, that she could NIAGARA. 147 never go back on those bridges ; they were not safe He stared at her cowering form in blank amaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Then it occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke ; and he said, " Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat." " O 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. " Isa- bel ! Isabel ! Are you crazy ? " he cried, as if he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shud- dered in reply ; he said, to mend matters, that it was a jest, about the boat ; and he was driven to despair when Isabel repeated, " I never can go back by the bridges, never." " But what do you propose to do ? " " I don't know, I don't know ! " He would try sarcasm. " Do you intend to 3et 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 hermi- fcage." Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered that he was not ashamed to make fan of her. He would try kindness. " Perhaps, darling, you'll let me carry you ashore." 148 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY. " No, that will bring double the weight on the bridge at once." " Couldn't you shut your eyes, and let me lead you ? " " Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids," she said, looking up fiercely. " The bridges are not safe. I'm not a thild, Basil. O, what shall we do ? " " I don't know," said Basil, gloomily. " It 'a an exigency for which I wasn't prepared." Then he silently gave himself to the Evil One, for hav- ing probably overwrought Isabel's nerves by re- peating that poem about Avery, and by the ensu- ing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it ; and she answered, " O no, it 's nothing but the bridges." He proved to her that the bridges, upon all known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give way. She shook her head, but made no answer, and he lost his patience. " Isabel," he cried, " I'm ashamed of you ! " " Don't say anything you'll be sorry for after- wards, Basil," she replied, with the foibearance of those who have reason and justice on their side. The rapids beat and shouted round their little prison-isle, each billow leaping as if possessed by a separate demon. The absurd horror of the situa- tion overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore, for she might spring from his grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to call for help ; and what if nobody came till she lost NIAGARA. 149 her mind from terror ? Or, what if somebody should come and find them in that ridiculous afflic- tion ? Somebody was coming ! " Isabel ! " he shouted in her ear, " here come those people we saw in the parlor last night." Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil's with her icy hand, rose, drew her arm con- vulsively through his, and walked ashore without a word. In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly "repaired her drooping head and tricked her beams " again. He could see her tearfully smiling through her veil. " My dear," he said, " I don't ask an explanation of your fright, for I don't suppose you could give it. But should you mind telling me why those people were so sovereign against it ? " " Why, dearest ! Don't you understand ? That Mrs. Richard whoever she is is so much like me." She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfying statement, and he thought he had better not ask further then, but wait in hope that the meaning would come to him. They walked on in silence till they came to the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a notice that persons have been killed by pieces of rock from the precipice overhang- ing the shore below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabei declined to visit the 160 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. Cave of the "Winds, to which these stairs lead, but was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower. "* Thanks ; no," said her husband. " You might find it unsafe to come back the way you went up. We can't count certainly upon the appearance of the lady who is so much like you ; and I've no fancy for spending my life on Terrapin Tower." So he found her a seat, and went alone to the top of the audacious little structure standing on the verge of the cataract, between the smooth curve of the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Cen- tral Fall, with the stormy sea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen through the mists, crawling away between its lofty bluffs before. He knew again the awful delight with which so long ago he had watched the changes in the beauty of the Ca- nadian Fall as it hung a mass of translucent green from the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl up from the abyss, and penetrate all its substance to the very crest, and then suddenly vanished from it, and perpetually renewed the same effect. The mystery of the rising vapors veiled the gulf into which the cataract swooped ; the sun shone, and a rainbow dreamed upon them. Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge, and here Basil saw an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss, who, when he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank NIAGARA. 151 bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a distinguished phrenologist had 152 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. examined his head, and told him he had equilib- rium so large that he could go anywhere. " On your bridal tour, I presume," he continued, as they approached the bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain, middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly ex pressed some inward festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. " Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara, and wife 's been here one* before on the same business. We see a good manj changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with tht others. Now that 's all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move on ? " he asked ; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply, by the guar- dian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet pleasing associations. At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table next Basil's, and they were all now talking cheer- fully over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall. " Well, Kitty," -the married lady was saying, " you can tell the girls what you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'll believe anything sooner than the truth." " O yes, indeed," said Kitty, " I've got a good deal of it made up already. I'll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most. I'm going to have had quite a flir- tation with the gentleman of the long blond mus- tache, whom we met on the bridge this morning NIAGARA. 153 and he 's got to do duty In accounting for my miss- ing glove. It'll never do to tell the girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny, I really can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited 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, homicidal gen- tility 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 164 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to find it so changed. " Yes," he said, " I can't account for him except as the ghost of Southern travel, and I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that almost any evil commends itself by its ruin ; the wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the re- mains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce. The impoverished slave-holder is a pathetic figure, in spite of all justice and reason the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and it is of no use to think of Andersonville in his pres- ence. This gentleman, and others like him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent the money they did not earn like princes ; they held their heads high ; they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair ; they received the homage of the doughface in his home. They came up here from their rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bul- lied the whole busy civilization of the North. Everybody who had merchandise or principles to sell truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphal progress. Now they're moneyless and subjugated (as they call it), there 's none so poor to do them reverence, and it 's left for me, an Abo- litionist from the cradle, to sigh over their fate. After all, they had noble traits, and it was no NIAGARA. 156 great wonder they got to despise us, seeing what most of us were. It seems to me I should like to know our friend. I can't help feeling towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feela towards him. I dare say he admires him im- mensely." There were not above a dozen other people in the room, and Basil contrasted the scene with that which the same place formerly presented. " In the old time," he said, " every table was full, and we dined to the music of a brass band. I can't say I liked the band, but I miss it. I wonder if our Southern friend misses it ? They gave us a very small allowance of brass band when we ar- rived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder what 'a come over the place," he said, as the Southern party, rising from the table, walked out of the diii- ing-room, attended by many treacherous echoes in spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters made. After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. A.8 each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cat- aract as a demon ; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the business-like aomposure of 156 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. fche man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara grad- ually changes from a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all odds, too, the most tremendous view of the Falls is afforded by the point on this drive whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe, and behold its three massive walls of sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone, and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy. Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy's Lane ? asked the driver at a certain point on their return ; but Isabel did not care for battle-fields, and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence ot his former visit. " They have a sort of tower of observation built on the battle-ground," he said, as they drove on down by the river, " and it was in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, who had helped his countrymen to be beaten in the fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelli- gible account of the battle, asking me first if I had ever heard of General Scott, and adding without flinching that here he got his earliest laurels. He seemed to go just so long to every listener, and nothing could stop him short, so I fell into a revery until he came to an end. It was hard to remem- ber, that sweet summer morning, when the sun ehone, and the birds sang, and the music of a pianc and a girl's voice rose from a bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had beer NIAGARA. 157 planted with cannon, instead of potatoes and corn, and that where the cows came down the farmer'* lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men had befallen. The blue and tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away rolled the beauti- ful land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past seemed only a vagary 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 utter- ance that morning. My driver explained after- wards, that persons visiting the field were com- monly so much pleased with the captain's eloquence, that they kept the noble old soldier in a brandy- and-water rapture throughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing his memory, and making the bat- tle bloodier and bloodier as the season advanced and the number of visitors increased. There my dear," he suddenly broke off, as they came in sight of a slender stream of water that escaped from the brow of a cliff on the American side below the Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery mist, " that 's the Bridal Veil ; and I suppose you think the stream, which is making such a fine display, yon- der, is some idle brooklet, ending a long course of error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge. It 's nothing of the kind ; it 's an honest hydraulic canal, of the most straightfonvurd character, a poor but respectable mill-race which has devoted itself 158 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. itrictly to business, and has turned mill-wheels in- stead 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." " What I can't help thinking of," said Isabel, who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal Veil, or anything about it, " is the awfulness of Btepping off these places in the night-time." She referred to the road which, next the precipice, is un- guarded by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we manage things differ- ently on our continent, and carriages go ruining over the brink from tune to tune. " If your thoughts have that direction," answered her husband, " we had better go back to the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow morning. It 's late for it to-day, at any rate." He had treated Isabel since the adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse. " I'm not afraid," she sighed, " but in the words of the retreating soldier, 4 I'm awfully demoral- ized ' ; " and added, " You know we must reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this even- ing." Part of their business also was to buy the 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 vras a colonel or at least a major, and he made a NIAGARA. 159 polite feint of calling Basil by some military title. He commended the trip they were about to make as the most magnificent and beautiful on the whole continent, and he commended them for intending to make it. He said that was Mrs. General Bowder of Philadelphia who just went out ; did they know her ? Somehow, the titles affected Basil as of older date than the late war, and as belonging to the militia period ; and he imagined for the agent the romance of a life spent at a watering-place, in contact with rich money-spending, pleasure-taking people, who formed his whole jovial world. The Colonel, who included them in this world, and there- by brevetted them rich and fashionable, could not secure a state-room for them on the boat, a per- fectly splendid Lake steamer, which would take them down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change, but he would give them a letter to the captain, who was a very par- ticular friend of his, and would be happy to show them as his friends every attention ; and so he wrote a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all reason making him feel for the moment that he was privileged by a document which was no doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in a loud cheerful voice ; he laughed jolliJy at no appar- ent joke ; he bowed very low and said, " Good- evening I " at parting, and they went away as if he had blessed them. The rest of the evening th^y spent in wandering 160 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixt- ure of quaintness and commonplaceness ; in hanging about the shop-windows with their monotonous va- riety of feather fans, each with a violently red o* yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, rnoe casons, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the neighboring squaws can invent ; in saunter- ing through these gay booths, pricing many things, and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geolog- ical formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heat of the gas-lights and the persistence of the mosquitoes. There were very few people besides themselves in the shops, and Isabel's purchases were not lavish. Her husband had made up his mind to get her some little keepsake ; and when he had taken her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops, and hastily bought her a feather fan, a magnifi- cent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue, ^ith a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, " Who 'a that for, Basil ? " demanded his wife ; " the cook ? '' But seeing his ghastly look at this, she Coll upon his neck, crying, " O you poor old taste- less darling ! You've got it for me ! " and seemed about to die of laughter. "Didn't you start and throw up your hands, NIAGARA. 161 he stammered, ' when you came to that case of fans?" " Yes, in horror ! Did you think I liked the cruel things, with their dead birds and their hideous colors ? O Basil, dearest ! You are incorrigible. Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature ? Now, my love, just .promise me one thing," she said pathetically. u We'ie go- ing to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know ; and perhaps you'll be wanting to surprise me with something there. Don't do it. Or if you must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color of it 's to be ; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there'll be some taste about it, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased." She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something about exchanging it. " No," she said, "we'll keep it as a a monument.'* And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day. So completely were their places changed, that he doubted if it were not he who had made that scene on the Third Sister ; and when Isabel said, " O, why won't men use their reasoning faculties ? " he could not for himself have claimed any, and he could not urge the truth : that he had bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty. She would not let him get angry, and he could say nothing 11 162 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. 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 indis- criminately feasted at first. They had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily mar- veled at the greed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations. They could not conceive why people should want to descend the inclined railway to the foot of the American Fall ; they smiled at the idea of going up Terrapin Tower ; they derided the vulgar daring of those who went out upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw about to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had no words to express their con- tempt. Then they made their excursion to the Whirl- pool, mistakenly going down on the American side, for it is much better seen from the other, though teen from any point it is the most impressive feature of the whole prodigious spectacle of Niagara. Here within the compass of a mile, those inland 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 orface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from thi NIAGARA. 168 Bcene of secret power, so different frcm the thun- derous splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a height of two hundred feet, clothed from the water's edge almost to their crests with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses perceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then, drunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away to Ontario through the narrow channel of the river Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that you do not know the half of its terribleness ; for those waters that look so smooth are great ridges and rings, forced, by the impulse of the currents, twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin. Nothing can live there, and with what is caught in its hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls and tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad, maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories, which even their telling does not wholly rob of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried into the whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy surges a travesty of life, apparently floating there at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid the waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the ieath that has long since befallen them. On the American side, not far below the rail- way suspension bridge, is an elevator more than a hundred and eighty feet high, which is meant to let people down to the shore below, and to give a view of the rapids on their own level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure of pin 164 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. t^s) sticks, but is doubtless stronger than it looks ; and at any rate, as it haa never yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced per- fectly safe. In the waiting-room at the top, Basil and Isabel found Mr. Richard and his ladies again, who got into the movable chamber with them, and they all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind, either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the struc- ture, where it was dark- ened by a rough weather- boarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of the elevator. A.n abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingled in Isabel's heart with a doubt of the value NIAGARA. 165 uf 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 satis- faction. She wanly smiled, and shrank closer to Basil ; while the other matron made nothing of seizing her husband violently by the arm and im- ploring him to stop it whenever they experienced a rougher jolt than usual. At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out of their prison by a humid young Englishman, with much clay on him, whose face was red and bathed in perspiration, for it was very hot down there in his little inclosure of baking pine boards, and it was not much cooler out on the rocks upon which the party, issued, descending and descending by repeated and desultory flights of steps, till at last they stood upon a huge fragment of stone right abreast of the rapids. Yet it was a magnificent sight, and for a moment none of them were sorry to have come. The surges did not look like the gigantic ripples on a river's course as they were, but like a procession of ocean billows ; they arose far aloft in vast bulks of clear green, and broke heavily into foam at the crest. Great blocks and shapeless fragments of rock strewed the margin of the awful torrent , gloomy walls of dark stone rose naked from these, bearded here and there with cedar, and everywhere frowning with shaggy brows of evergreen. The place is inexpressibly lonely and dreadful, and one feels like an alien presence there, or as if ho had 166 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY. intruded upon some rnood or haunt of Nature in which she had a right to be forever alone. The slight, impudent structure of the elevator rises through the solitude, like a thing that merits ruin, yet it is better than something more elaborate, for it looks temporary, and since there must be an ele- vator, it is well to have it of the most transitory aspect. Some such quality of rude impermanence consoles you for the presence of most improvements by which you enjoy Niagara ; the suspension bridges for their part being saved from offensiveness by their beauty and unreality. Ascending, none of the party spoke ; Isabel and the other matron blanched in each other's faces; their husbands maintained a stolid resignation. When they stepped out of their trap into the wait- ing-room at the top, " What I like about these little adventures," said Mr. Richard to Basil, ab- ruptly, " is getting safely out of them. Good-morn- ing, sir." He bowed slightly to Isabel, who re- turned his politeness, and exchanged faint nods, or glances, with the ladies. They got into their sepa- rate carriages, and at that safe distance made each other more decided obeisances. " Well," observed Basil, " I suppose we're intro- duced now. We shall be meeting them from time W> time throughout our journey. You know how the same faces and the same trunks used to keep fcnrning up in our travels on the other side. Once meet people in travelling, and you can't get rid (rf them." NIAGARA. 161 ** Yes," said Isabel, as if continuing his train mer of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passen- gers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes ; old cannon, thrust endwise into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against pass- ing wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand their pass- ports ? The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch. How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning hour ! On what perverse pretext, then, was it not gome ancient town of Normandy ? 44 Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they'd soon rattle this old wall down and let in a little fresh air ! " said a patriotic voice at Isabel't elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow QUEBEC. 231 irregular otreets, the huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under which they drove on to the hotel. As they dashed into a broad open square, " Here is the French Cathedral ; there is the Upper Town Market ; yonder are the Jesuit Barracks ! " cried Basil ; and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side of the square, and a low, massive yellow building at the other, and, between the two, long ranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands, protected by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas. Then they dashed round the corner of a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The low ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy wood-work, the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the de- sired character of age, and its slovenly state be- stowed an additional charm. In another place they might have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they would almost have resented it. By a chance they had the best room in the house, but they held it only till certain people who had engaged it by tele- graph should arrive in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool ; and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The house was very full, and the Ellisons (who had ccme on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less state only on like conditions. The travellers all met at breakfast, which waa admirably cooked, and well served, with the attend- ance of those swarms of flies which infest Quebec, 232 THEIE WEDDING JOURNEY. and especially infested the old Musty House, in Bummer. It had, of course, the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which the traveller breakfasts every day as long as he remains in Lower Canada ; and it represented the abundance of wild berries in the Quebec market ; and it was otherwise a breakfast worthy of the appetites that honored it. Thers were not many other Americans besides themselves at this hotel, which seemed, indeed, to be kept open to oblige such travellers as had been there before, and could not persuade themselves to try the new Hotel St. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted. Most of the faces our tourists saw were English or English-Canadian, and the young people from Omaha, who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in harmony with the place. They appeared to be a bridal party, but which of the two sisters, in buff linen clad from head to foot, was the bride, never became known. Both were equally free with the husband, and he was impartially fond of both : it was quite a family affair. For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see the city in company with Miss Ellison ; but it was only a passing weakness. She remembered directly the coolness between friends which she had seen caused by objects of interest in Europe, and she wisely deferred a more intimate acquaintance till it oould have a purely social basis. After all, nothing is BO tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy QUEBEC. 238 m so apt to end in mutual dislike, except grati- tude. So the ladies parted friends till dinner, and drove off in separate carriages. As in other show cities, there is a routine at Quebec for travellers who come on Saturday and go on Monday, and few depart from it. Our friends necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. It was raining one of those cold rains by which the scarce-banished winter reminds the Canadian field? of his nearness even in midsummer, though between the bitter showers the air was sultry and close ; and it was just the light in which to see the grim strength of the fortress next strongest to Gibraltar in the world. They passed a heavy iron gateway, and up through a winding lane of masonry to the gate of the citadel, where they were delivered into the care of Private Joseph Drakes, who was to show them such parts of the place as are open to curiosity. But, a citadel which has never stood a siege, or been threatened by any danger more seri- ous than Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong, but a dull piece of masonry to the civilian ; and our tourists more rejoiced in the crumbling fragment of the old French wall which the English destroyed than in all they had built ; and they valued the lat- ter work chiefly for the glorious prospects of the St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it com- manded. Advanced into the centre of an amphi- theatre inconceivably vast, that enormous beak of rock overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and 234 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. then, in every direction, immeasurable stretches of gardened vale, and wooded upland, till all melts into the purple of the encircling mountains. Far and near are lovely white villages nestling under elms, in the heart of fields and meadows ; and everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided farms stretch downward to the river-shores. The best roads on the continent make this beauty and richness accessible ; each little village boasts some natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract : and this landscape, magnificent beyond any in east- ern America, is historical and interesting beyond all others. Hither came Jacques Cartier three hundred and fifty years ago, and wintered on the low point there by the St. Charles ; here, nearly a century after, but still fourteen years before the landing at Plymouth, Champlain founded the mis- sionary city of Quebec ; round this rocky beak came sailing the half -piratical armament of the Calvinist Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebec in the interest of the English, holding it three years ; in the Lower Town, yonder, first landed the coldly welcomed Jesuits, who came with the returning French and made Quebec forever eloquent of their zeal, their guile, their heroism ; at the foot of this rock lay the fleet of Sir William Phipps, governor of Massa- chusetts, and vainly assailed it in 1698 ; in 1759 came Wolfe and embattled all the region, on river and land, till at last the bravely defended city feL, uito his dying hand on the Plains of Abraham . QUEBEC. 235 here Montgomery laid down his life at the head of the boldest and most hopeless effort of our War of Independence. Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an enemy expecting drink-money, pointed out the sign' board on the face of the crag commemorating Montgomery's death; and then showed them 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 mis- demeanors, from an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dundrearily from his fresh English cheeks. There was that immense difference between him and the men in physical grandeur and beauty, which is so notable in the aristocratically ordered military services of Europe, and which makes the rank seem of another race from the file. Private Drakes saluted his superior, and visibly deteriorated in his presence, though his breast was covered with medals, and he had fought England's battles in every part of the world. It was a gross injustice, the triumph of a thousand years of wrong ; and it was touching to have Private Drakes say that he expected in three months to begin life for himself, after twenty years' service of the Queen ; and did they think he could get anything to do in the States? He scarcely knew what he was fit for, but he thought to so little in him came the victories he had helped to win in the Crimea, in China, and in India that he cold take care of a gentleman's horse and work 236 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. about his place. He looked inquiringly at Basil, aa if he might be a gentleman with a horse to be taken care of and a place to be worked about, and made him regret that he was not a man of substance enough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs. Drakes and the brood of Ducklings, who had beer shown to him stowed away in one of those cavernous rooms in the earthworks where the married soldiert ' jA*S|O have their quarters. His regret enriched the re- ward 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 every- body got on there and he bade our friends an QUEBEC. 237 affectionate fare-well as they drove away to the Plains of Abraham. The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading north- ward to the old battle-ground and beyond it ; but fchepe face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawenct 1 and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from the high- way ; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly med- itate whatever emotion he will for the scene of Wolfe's death as he rides along. His loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who must always stand forth in history a figure of beau- tiful and singular distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness, and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear. The whole story of the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall was a triumph for all the English-speaking race, and to us Americans, long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her walls or sustained Sy her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringing bells and blazing bonfires throughout the Colonies ; yet now we cannot think without pity of the hopes extinguished and the labors brought to naught in her overthrow. That strange colony of priests and soldiers, of martyrs and heroes, of which she was the capital, willing to peiish for an alle- giance to which the mother-country was indifferent. 288 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and fighting against the armies with which England was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle ; and Mont- calm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the " Elegy in a Country Church- yard," which he would " rather have written than beat the French to-morrow ; " but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, " So much the better ; then I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec." In the city for which they perished their fame has never been divided. The English have shown themselves very generous victors ; perhaps nothing could be alleged against them, but that they were victors. A shaft common to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in the Governor's Garden ; and in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalm died, by the same con- querors who raised to Wolfe's memory the column on the battle-field. A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than the rest of the field ; the friendly hollow that jheltered him from the fire of the French dwarfs his monument ; yet it is sufficient, and the simple in icription, " Here died Wolfe victorious," gives it a QUEBEC. dignity which many cubits of added stature could not bestow. Another of those bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning's sunshine, drove suddenly across the open plain, and our tour- ists comfortably sentimentalized the scene behind the close-drawn curtains of their carriage. Here a whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded Isaoel ; and she said, " Only think of it ! " and looked to a wandering fold of her skirt, upon which the rain beat through a rent of the curtain. Do I pitch the pipe too low ? We poor honest men are at a sad disadvantage ; and now and then I am minded to give a loose to fancy, and attribute something really grand and fine to my people, in order to make them worthier the reader's respected acquaintance. But again, I forbid myself in a higher interest ; and I am afraid that even if I were less virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a battle-field ; for of all things of the past a battle is the least conceivable. I have heard men who fought in many battles say that the recollection was like a dream to them ; and what can the merely civilian imagination do on the Plains of Abraham, with the fact that there, more than a century ago, certain thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a bright September morning, to kill and maim as many Englishmen ? This ground, so green and soft with grass beneath the feet, was it once torn with shot and soaked with the blood of men ? Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable 240 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. lain, for whom tender hearts away yonder over th 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 avay for shelter into little hollows, and behind bushes and fallen trees ! Did be, whose soul was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like some ravening beast ? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din of arms, the cries of victory, I vainly strive to conjure up some image of it all now ; and God be thanked, horrible spectre ! that, fill the world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its moments of sanity and peace. Least credible art thou on the old battle-fields, where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze and sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass ! The red stain in Basil's thought yielded to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land from which it had long since faded, and the words on the monument, " Here died Wolfe victorious," did not proclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but his self-con- quest, his victory over fear and pain and love of life. Alas ! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor those who renounce self in the joy of their kind, equally with those who devote themselves through the anguish and loss of thousands ? So old a world. %nd groping still ! The tourists were better fitted for the next occa- sion of sentiment, which was at the Hotel Dieru QUEBEC. 241 whither they went after returning from the battle- field. It took all the mal-address of which trav- ellers are masters to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through grated doors, and set divers sym- pathetic spectators doing ineffectual services, 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 Bre*beuf, one of those Jesuit mar- tyrs who perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished, and whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman, with some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister with a pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the chapel, which they found in the expected taste, and ex- quisitely neat and cool, but lacking the martyr's skull. They asked if it were not to be seen. " Ah, yes, poor Pe"re Bre*beuf ! " sighed the gentle sister, with the tone and manner of having lost him yesterday ; "we had it down only last week, show- ing it to some Jesuit fathers ; but it 's in the con- vent now, and isn't to be seen." And there min- gled apparently in her regret for Pdre Bre"beuf 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 compli- M 242 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. oients with many shrugs, but she was pleased ; fat when we renounce the pomps and vanities of thia world, we are pretty sure to find them in some other, if we are women. She, good and pure soul, whose whole life was given to self-denying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the clarified likeness of this-worldliness. O, had they seen the HStel Dieu at Montreal ? Then (with a vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care to look at this, which by comparison was nothing. Yet she invited them to go through the wards if they would, and was clearly proud to have them see the wonderful cleanness and comfort of the place. There were not many patients, but here and there a wan or fevered face looked at them from its pillow, or a weak form drooped beside a bed, or a group of convalescents softly talked to- gether. They came presently to the last hall, at the end of which sat another nun, beside a win- dow that gave a view of the busy port, and beyond it the landscape of village-lit plain and forest-dark- ened height. On a table at her elbow stood a rose-tree, on which hung two only pale tea-roses, 90 fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wondei and praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun, to whom there had been some sort of presentation, gathered one of the roses, and with a shy grace offered it to Isabel, who shrank back a little ai from too costly a gift. " Take it," said the first QUEBEC. 243 Iran, with her pretty French accent ; while the other, who spoke no English at all, beamed a placid smile ; and Isabel took it. The flower, ly- ing light in her palm, exhaled a delicate odor, and 1 v r\\ 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 244 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. poet's heart against ; but sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it ; at most it might have expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless love of oome favorite saint in paradise. Cold, and pale, and sweet, was it indeed only a flower, this cloistered rose of the HStel Dieu ? " Breathe it," said the gentle Gray Sister ; "sometimes the air of the hospital offends. Not us, no ; we are used ; but you come from the out- side." And she gave her rose for this humble use as lovingly as she devoted herself to her lowly cares. " It is very little to see," she said at the end ; " but if you are pleased, I am very glad. Good- by, good-by ! " She stood with her arms folded, and watched them out of sight with her kind, co- quettish little smile, and then the mute, blank life of the nun resumed her. From HStel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a step ; both were in the same street ; but our friends fancied themselves to have come an immense dis- tance when they sat down at an early dinner, amidst the clash of crockery and cutlery, and looked round upon all the profane travelling world assembled. Their regard presently fixed upon one company which monopolized a whole table, and were defined from the other diners by peculiarities as marked as those of the Soeurs Grises themselves. There were only two men among some eight or ten women ; one of the former had a bad amiable face, with QUEBEC. 246 eyes full of a merry deviltry ; the other, clean* shaven, and dark, was demure and silent as a priest. The ladies were of various types, but of one effect, with large rolling eyes, and faces that somehow regarded the beholder as from a distance, and with an impartial feeling for him as for an element of publicity. One of them, who caressed a lapdog with one hand while she served herself with the other, was, as she seemed to believe, a blonde ; she had pale blue eyes, and her hair was cut in front so as to cover her forehead with a straggling sandy- colored fringe. She had an English look, and three or four others, with dark complexion and black, unsteady eyes, and various abandon of back-hair, looked like Cockney houris of Jewish blood ; while two of the lovely company were clearly of our own nation, as was the young man with the reckless laughing face. The ladies were dressed and jew- eled with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary style of society what scene-painting is to jointing, and might have borne close inspec- tion no better. They seemed the best-humored people in the world, and on the kindliest terms with each other. The waiters shared their pleasant mood, and served them affectionately, and were now and then invited to join in the gay talk which babbled on over dislocated aspirates, and filled the air with a sentiment of vagabond enjoyment, of fche romantic freedom of violated convention, of something Gil Bias-like, almost picaresque. 246 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. If they had needed explanation it would have been given by the announcement in the office of the hotel that a troupe of British blondes was then appearing in Quebec for one week only. After dinner they took possession of the parlor, and while one strummed fitfully upon the ailing hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop, of oourse, 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 Montre- hal," answered the British blonde of American birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her sis- ter. " But we cahn't, you know," said the lady with the fringed forehead ; " Hagnes is gone on to New York, and there 's nobody to do W*uu." " Yes, you know," demanded the first speaker, " oo 's to do Wenus ? " Bella 's to do Wenus," said a third. There was an outcry at this, and " 'Ow eyer would she get herself up for Wenus ? " and " W'at a guy she'll look ! " and " Nonsense ! Bella 's toe 'eavy for Wenus ! " came from different lively crit- ics ; and the debate threatened to become too inti- mate for the public ear, when one of their gentle- men came in and said, " Charley don't seem so well this afternoon." On this the chorus changed QUEBEC. 247 ha note, and at the proposal, " Poor Charley, let ' go and cheer 'im hup a bit," the whole good- tem- pered company trooped out of the parlor together. Our tourists meant to give the rest of the after- noon to that sort of aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign city un- awares, and best develops its charm of strange- ness. So they went out and took their fill of Que- bec with appetites keen through long fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Mon- treal, and impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets ; the thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied having been English for a hundred years ; the porte-cocheres beside every house ; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bell- pulls ; the rough-paved, rattling streets ; the shin- ing roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows ; the littleness of the private houses, and the great- ness of the high-walled and garden-girdled con- vents ; the breadths of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath ; the batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon the carriages, while the chil- dren tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell ; the sloping market-place before the cathe- dral, where yet some remnant of the morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of 248 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. an old woman peasant enough to have sold it in any market-place of Europe ; the small, dark shops be- yond the quarter invaded by English retail trade ; the movement of all the strange figures of cleric and lay and military life ; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English ; the encounter of other tourists, the passage back and forth through the different city gates ; the public wooden stair- ways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the Lower Town ; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and shipping and seafaring lif e hud- dled close in under the hill ; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them ; and the marshy mead- ows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm. They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings ; and then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in re- veling amid the familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering statue of a saint, e^ery rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that or the carven and gilded clouds above the high altar Boat " Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders," was precious to them : the sacristan dusting the QUEBEC. 249 sacred properties with a feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed, was as a long-lost brother ; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for the young girls and old women who stepped in for a half-hour's devotion, and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from affairs and crops, and gave it to 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 them- selves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility of cold. In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them. The French- men, who expected to find 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 emo- tion to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder some characteristic aspect of Quebec, a bit of street with heavy stone houses, opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising slim against it, you say, to your satisfied soul, "Yes, it is the real thing I " and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a 250 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot ; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own con- sciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that light of the North is there. It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular garden near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers abounded, mari- gold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflores- cence, and they fancied that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that garden, where the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again with a musical shiver. The conscious- ness of this latent cold, of winter only held in abey- ance by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the once magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where there was actually a rawness in the late af- ternoon air, and whither they were strolling for the view from its height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raised thore 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 QUEBEC. 251 posthumous friendship between Wolfe and Mont- calm, which gives their memory its rare distinction, and unites them, who fell in fight against each other, as closely as if they had both died for the game cause. Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the city that has once been a capital ; and this odor of fallen nobility belongs to Quebec, which was a cap- ital in the European sense, with all the advantages of a small vice-regal court, and its social and polit- ical intrigues, in the French times. Under the English, for a hundred years it was the centre of Colonial civilization and refinement, with a gov- ernor-general's residence and a brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to which the large garrison of former days gave gayety and romance. The hon- ors of a capital, first shared with Montreal and Toronto, now rest with half-savage Ottawa ; and the garrison has dwindled to a regiment of rifles, whose presence would hardly be known, but for the natty sergeants lounging, stick in hand, about the streets and courting the nurse-maids. But in the days of old there were scenes of carnival pleasure in the Governor's Garden, and there the garrison band still plays once a week, when it is filled by the fashion and beauty of Quebec, and some sem- blance of the past is recalled. It is otherwise a lonesome, indifferently tended place, and on this afternoon there was no one there but a few loafing young fellows of low degree. French and English, 252 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and children that played screaming from seat to seat and path to path and over the too-heavily shaded grass. In spite of a conspicuous warning that any dog entering the garden would be de- stroyed, the place was thronged with dogs unmo- lested and apparently in no danger of the threat- ened doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation was given in the legend rudely carved upon one of the benches, " Success to the Irish Republic I " The morning of the next day our tourists gave to hearing mass at the French cathedral, which was not different, to their heretical senses, from any other mass, except that the ceremony was performed with a very full clerical force, and was attended by an uncommonly devout congregation. With Eu- rope constantly in their minds, they were bewil- dered to find the worshippers not chiefly old and young women, but men also of all ages and of every degree, from the neat peasant in his Sabbath-day best to the modish young Quebecker, who spread his handkerchief on the floor to save his pantaloons during supplication. There was fashion and educa- tion in large degree among the men, and there was in all a pious attention to the function in poetical keeping with the origin and history of a city which the zeal of the Church had founded. A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced coat ar.d bearing a silver staff, bowed to them when they entered, and, leading them to a pew, punched up a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed hit QUEBEC. 253 prayers in the aisle outside, while they took his place. It appeared to Isabel very unjust that their curiosity should displace his religion ; but she con- soled herself by making Basil give a shilling to the man who, preceded by the shining beadle, came round to take up a collection. The peasant could have given nothing but copper, and she felt that this restored the lost balance of righteousness in their favor. There was a sermon, very sweetly and gracefully delivered by a young priest of singular beauty, even among clergy whose good looks are so notable as those of Quebec ; and then they followed the orderly crowd of worshippers out, and left the cathedral to the sacristan and the odor of incense. They thought the type of French-Canadian better here than at Montreal, and they particularly noticed the greater number of pretty young girls. All classes were well dressed; for though the best dressed could not be called stylish according to the American standard, as Isabel decided, and had only a provincial gentility, the poorest wore garments that were clean and whole. Everybody, too, was going to have a hot Sunday dinner, if there was any truth in the odors that steamed out of every door and window ; and this dinner was to be abun- dantly garnished with onions, for the dullest nose could not err concerning that savor. Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed itself superior to every distinction of race, were trolling vaguely and not always quite happily 254 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. about ; but they made no impression on the propel local character, and the air throughout the morning was full of the sentiment of Sunday in a Catholic city. There was the apparently meaningless jan- gling of bells, with profound hushes between, and then more jubilant jangling, and then deeper silence ; there was the devout trooping of the crowds to the churches ; and there was the beginning of the long afternoon's lounging and amusement with which the people of that faith reward their morning's de- votion. Little stands for the sale of knotty apples and choke-cherries and cakes and cider sprang mag- ically into existence after service, and people were already eating and drinking at them. The carriage- drivers resumed their chase of the tourists, and the unvoiceful stir of the new week had begun again. Quebec, hi fact, is but a pantomimic reproduction of France ; it is as if two centuries in a new land, amidst the primeval silences of nature and the long hush of the Northern winters, had stilled the tongues of the lively folk and made them taciturn as we of a graver race. They have kept the ancestral vivac- ity of manner ; the elegance of the shrug is intact ; the talking hands take part in dialogue ; the agitated person will have its share of expression. But the loud and eager tone is wanting, and their dumb show mystifies the beholder almost as much as the Southern architecture under the slanting Northern on. It is not America ; if it is not France, what it it? QUEBEC. 256 Of the many beautiful things to see in the neigh- borhood of Quebec, our wedding-journeyers were in doubt on which to bestow their one precious after- noon. Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and its remnant of bleached and fading Hurons, or the Isle of Orleans with its fertile farms and its primi- tive peasant life, or Montmorenci, with the un- rivaled fall and the long drive through the beauti- ful village of Beauport ? Isabel chose the last, be- cause Basil had been there before, and it had to it the poetry of the wasted years in which she did not know him. She had possessed herself of the jour- nal of his early travels, among the other portions and parcels recoverable from the dreadful past, and from time to time on this journey she had read him passages out of it, with mingled sentiment and irony, and, whether she was mocking or admiring, equally to his confusion. Now, as they smoothly bowled away from the city, she made him listen to what he had written o^ the same excursion long ago. It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment about the village and the rural sights, and especially a girl tossing hay in the field. Yet it had 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 aver- iges, and may be insured." There was regret, fancied or expressed, in hi* 56 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. tone, that made her sigh, "Ah ! if I'd only had a little more money, you might have devoted yourself to literature ; " for she was a true Bostonian in her honor of our poor craft. " O, you're not greatly to blame," answered her husband, " and I forgive you the little wrong you're done me. I was quits with the Muse, at any rate, you know, before we were married ; and I'm very well satisfied to be going back to my applications and policies to-morrow." To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her. Then their wedding journey would begin to end to- morrow ! So it would, she owned with another sigh ; and yet it seemed impossible. " There, ma'am," said the driver, rising from his seat and facing round, while he pointed with his whip towards Quebec, " that 's what we call the Sil- ver City." They looked back with him at the city, whose thousands of turned roofs, rising one above the other from the water's edge to the citadel, were all a splendor of argent light in the afternoon sun. It was indeed as if some magic had clothed that huge rock, base and steepy flank and crest, with a silver city. They gazed upon the marvel with cries of joy that satisfied the driver's utmost pride in it, and Isabel said, " To live there, there in that Silver City, in perpetual sojourn ! To be always going to go on a morrow that never came I To be forever within one day of the end of a wedding journey that never ended I " QUEBEC. 267 From far down the river by which they rode came the sound of a cannon, breaking the Sabbath repose of the air. '" That 's the gun of the Liver- pool steamer, just coming in," said the driver. " O," cried Isabel, " I'm thankful we're only to rtay one night more, for now we shall be turned out of our nice room by those people who tele- graphed for it ! " There is a continuous village along the St. Law- rence from Quebec, almost to Montmorenci ; and they met crowds of villagers coming from the church as they passed through Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at the change that had befal- len them. They had their Sunday's best on, and the women, instead of wearing the peasant costume in which he had first seen them, were now dressed as if out of " Harper's Bazar " of the year before. He anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw hats and the bright sacks and kirtles were no more. " O, you'd see them on weekdays, sir," was the answer, "but they're not so plenty any time aa they used to be." He opened his store of facts about the habitant, whom he praised for every rirtue, for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for amiability ; and his words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish race, between which and the Canadians there is no kind- ness lost. But the looks of the passers-by corrob- orated him, and as for the little houses, open-doored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window 17 358 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and portal, they were miracles of picturesqueneai 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 poultry about the barns ; I dare be sworn there is always a small girl driving a flock of decorous ducks down the middle of the street ; and of the priest with a book under his arm, pass- ing a way-side shrine, what possible doubt ? The houses, which are of one model, are built by the peasants themselves with the stone which their land yields more abundantly than any other crop, and are furnished with galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the fleeting summer, and perhaps to remember the long-lost ancestral summers of Nor- mandy. At every moment, in passing through this ideally neat and pretty village, our tourists must 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 undy- ing charm, and which, whatever the land's political allegiance, is there perpetual Seigneur. The village, stretching along the broad interval* QUEBEC. 259 of the St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you draw near tlie Falls of Montmorenci, and presently you drive past the grove shutting from the road the country-house in which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and come in sight of two lofty towers of stone, monuments and witnesses of the tragedy of Montmorenci. Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against the will of the neighboring habitans, hung from these towers high over the long plunge of the cata- ract. But one morning of the fatal spring after the first winter's frost had tried the hold of the cable on the rocks, an old peasant and his wife with their little grandson set out in their cart to pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoring wires suddenly lost their grip upon the shore, and whirled into the air; the bridge crashed under the hapless passengers and they were launched from its height upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged, two hundred and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss. The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon low stone piers, so far up the river from the cata- ract that whoever fell from it would yet have many a chance for life ; and it would have been perilous to offer to replace the fallen structure, which, in the belief of faithful Christians, clearly belonged u> the numerous bridges built by the Devil, in times when the Devil did not call himself a civil sngineer. 860 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad tale as he halted his horses on the bridge ; and as his passengers looked down the rock-fretted brown torrent 'towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudder that ever she had set foot on that sus- pension-bridge below Niagara, and to prove to Basil's confusion that her doubt of the bridges between the Three Sisters was not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdom concerning the unsafety of all bridges of that design. From the gate opening into the grounds about the fall two or three little French boys, whom they had not the heart to forbid, ran noisily before them with cries in their sole English, " This way, sir I " and led toward a weather-beaten summer-house that tottered upon a projecting rock above the verge of the cataract. But our tourists shook their heads, and turned away for a more distant and less dizzy enjoyment of the spectacle, though any com- manding point was sufficiently chasmal and precip- itous. The lofty bluff was scooped inward from the St. Lawrence in a vast irregular semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one within another, sinking far into its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or meagrely wooded here and there with evergreen. From the central brink of these gloomy purple chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a cloud, " Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did QUEBEC. 261 1 say a cloud, because I find it already said to my hand, as it were, in a pretty verse, and because I must needs liken Montmorenci to something that is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent the glinting of the water in its downward swoop ; it is like some broad slope of sun-smitten snow; but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has a creamy warmth in its luminous mass ; and so, there hangs the cataract unsaid as before. It is a mystery that anything so grand should be so lovely, that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet be so large that one glance fails to com- prehend it all. The rugged wildness of the cliffs and hollows about it is softened by its gracious beauty, which half redeems the vulgarity of the timber-merchant's uses in setting the river at work in his saw-mills and choking its outlet into the St. Lawrence with rafts of lumber and rubbish of slabs and shingles. Nay, rather, it is alone amidst these things, and the eye takes note of them by a sepa- rate effort. Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept with its white clover to the edge of the precipice, and gazed dreamily upon the fall, filling their vis- ion with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser 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 land- scape gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a pensive sentiment of autumn to the world. The 262 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. crickets cried amongst the grass ; the hesitating chirp of birds came from the tree overhead ; a shaggy colt left off grazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them ; their little guides, having QUEBEC. 268 found that these people had no pleasure in the sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a prec- ipice, threw themselves also down upon the grass and crooned a long, long ballad in a mournful minor key about some maiden whose name was La Belle Adeline. It was a moment of unmixed en- pyment for every sense, and through all their being they were glad ; which considering, they ceased to be so, with a deep sigh, as one reasoning that he dreams must presently awake. They never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it ; but perhaps their rapture would have ceased as swiftly, even if they had not tried to make it a fact of consciousness. " If there were not dinner after such experiences as these," said Isabel, as they sat at table that evening, " I don't know what would become of one. But dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty, and brings you gently back to earth. You must eat, don't you see, and there 's nothing disgraceful about what you're obliged to do ; and so it 's all right." " Isabel, Isabel," cried her husband, " you have a wonderful mind, and its workings always amaze me. But be careful, my dear ; be careful. Don't work it too hard. The human brain, you know : delicate organ." " Well, you understand what I mean ; and 1 think it 's one of the great charms of a husband, 264 THEffi WEDDING JOURNEY. that you're not forced to express yourself to him. A husband," continued Isabel, sententiously, poising K, bit of meringue between her thumb and finger, for they had reached that point hi the repast, " a husband is almost as good as another woman I " In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and ex- changed the history of the day with them. " Certainly," said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, " it 'a been a pleasant day enough, but what of the night ? You've been turned out, too, by those people who came on the steamer, and who might as well have stayed on board to-night ; have you got another room?" " Not precisely," said Isabel ; " we have a coop hi the fifth story, right under the roof." Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her hus- band and cried in tones of reproach, " Richard, Mrs. March has a room ! " " A coop, she said" retorted that amiable Colonel, " and we're too good for that. The clerk is keeping us in suspense about a room, because he means to surprise us with something palatial at the end. It 's his joking way." " Nonsense ! " said Mrs. Ellison. " Have yon seen him since dinner- ? " " I have made life a burden to him for the last half-hour," returned the Colonel, with the kindliest mile. " O Richard," cried his wife, in despair of hii amendment, " you wouldn't make life a burden to QUEBEC 266 * mouse ! " And having nothing else for it, she laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness. '* Well, Fanny," the Colonel irrelevantly an- swered, " put on your hat and things, and let 's all go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. I know our friends want to go. It 's something worth see- ing ; and by the time we get back, the clerk will have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment." Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sunday-night promenading on Durham Terrace. This is the ample space on the brow of the cliff to the left of the citadel, the noblest and most commanding posi- tion in the whole city, which was formerly occupied by the old castle of Saint Louis, where dwelt the brave Count Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime. The castle went the way of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord Durham leveled the site and made it a public prom- enade. A stately arcade of solid masonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and an iron parapet in- closes it ; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and some idle old guns for the children to clamber over and play with. A soft twilight had followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a willing eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring into more romantic relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening, and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets of the Lower Town The 266 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNEY. Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there waa a constant coming and going of the promenaders, who each formally paced back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion, but rather of middling condition in lif e ; the English being represented only by a few young fellows and now and then a red- faced old gentleman with an Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair American costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essen- tially Quebecian. The young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers, had the true touch of provin- cial unstylishness, the young men the ineffectual excess of the second-rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich inelegance of a bourgeoisie in their best. A few better-figured avocats or notaires (their pro- fession was as unmistakable as if they had carried their well - polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and gravely talked with each other. The non- American character of the scene was not less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed according to his own taste and frankly in- dulged private preferences in shapes and colors. One of the promenaders was in white, even to his canvas hoes ; another, with yet bolder individuality, ap- peared in perfect purple. It had a strange, almost portentous effect when these two startling figure* met as friends and joined each other in the prome- QUEBEC. 267 Bade wit'u linked arms ; but the evening was already beginning to darken round them, and presently the purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside the glimmering white. The valleys and the heights now vanished ; but the river denned 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 Lowei Town, two hundred feet below them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit windows and dark and shining streets around the mighty rock, mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle peculiarly Northern and characteristic of Quebec re- vealed itself ; a long arch brightened over the north- ern horizon ; the tremulous flames of the aurora, pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson, shot up- ward from it, and played with a weird apparition and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers looked, a gun boomed from the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the bugle sprang out upon the silence. Then they all said, " How perfectly hi keeping everything has been I " and sauntered back to the hotel. The Colonel went into the office to give the cleik another turn on the rack, and make him confess to a hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and in- vited Miss Kitty to look at her coop in the fifth 268 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. story. As they approached, light and music and laughter 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 mem- ber of the troupe. Some one was heard to say, " Well, 'ow do you feel now, Charley ? " and a aound of subdued swearing responded, followed by more laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a stir of feet and dresses as for departure. The two listeners shrank together; as women they could not enjoy these proofs of the jolly cam- araderie existing among the people of the troupe. They trembled as before the. merriment of as many light-hearted, careless, good-natured young men : it was no harm, but it was dismaying ; and, " 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 strategist, was making show of a desperation more violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally forced into the attitude of moder- ating his fury. " Well, Fanny, that 's all he can do for us ; and I do think it 's the most outrageous thing in the world ! It 's real mean ! " Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own de- nunciatory manner, but just then she was obliged QUEBEC. 269 to answer Isabel's eager inquiry whether they had got a room yet. " Yes, a room," she said, " with two beds. But what are we to do with one room ? That clerk I don't know what to call him" (" Call him a hotel-clerk, my dear ; you can't say anything worse," interrupted her husband)- ** seems to think the matter perfectly settled." " You see, Mrs. March," added the Colonel, " he 's able to bully us in this way because he has fche architecture on his side. There isn't another room in the house." " Let me think a moment," said Isabel not think- ing an instant. She had taken a fancy to at least two of these people from the first, and in the last hour they had all become very well acquainted ; now she said, " I'll tell you : there are two beds in our room also ; we ladies will take one room, and you gentlemen the other I " " Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of the Boston mind," said the Colonel, while his females civilly protested and consented ; " and I might almost hail you as our preserver. If ever you come to Milwaukee, which is the centre of the world, as Boston is, we I shall be happy to have you call at my place of business. I didn't commit myself, did I, Fanny ? I am sometimes hospita- ble to excess, Mrs. March," he said, to explain hia aside. " And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and the gratitude of the houseless stranger follow you- 270 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. The whole party explored both rooms, and th ladies decided to keep Isabel's. The Colonel was dispatched to see that the wraps and traps of his party were sent to this number, and Basil went with him. The things came long before the gentle- men returned, but the ladies happily employed the interval in talking over the excitements of the day, and in saying from time to time, " So very kind of you, Mrs. March," and " I don't know what we should have done," and " Don't speak of it, please," and " I'm sure it 's a great pleasure to me." In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid actor lay, and where lately there had been min- strelsy and apparently dancing for his solace, there was now comparative silence. Two women's voices talked together, and now and then a guitar was touched by a wandering hand. Isabel had just put ap her handkerchief to conceal her first yawn, when the gentlemen, odorous of cigars, returned to say good-night. " It 's the second door from this, isn't it, Isabel ? ' J asked her husband. " Yes, the second door. Good-night." " Good-night." The two men walked off together ; but in a min ate afterwards they had returned and were knock ing tremulously at the closed door. " O, what has happened ? " chorused the ladiea in woeful tune, seeing a certain wildntds in the facet that confronted them. QUEBEC. 271 '* We don't know ! " answered the others in aa fearful a key, and related how they had found the door of their room ajar, and a bright light stream- ing into the corridor. They did not stop to ponder this fact, but, with the heedlessness of their sex, pushed the door wide open, when they anv seated before the mirror a bewildering figure, with di- sheveled locks wandering down the back, and in dishabille expressive of being quite at home there, which turned upon them a pair of pale blue eyes, under a forehead remarkable for the straggling fringe of hair that covered it. They professed to have remained transfixed at the sight, and to have noted a like dismay on the visage before the glass, ere they summoned strength to fly. These facts Colonel Ellison gave at the command of his wife, with many protests and insincere delays amidst which the curiosity of his hearers alone prevented them from rending him in pieces. " And what do you suppose it was ? " demanded his wife, with forced calmness, when he had at last made an end of the story and his abominable hypoc- risies. " Well, /think it was a mermaid. ' ** A mermaid ! " said his wife, scornfully. " Flow do vou know ? " v " It had a comb in its hand, for one thing ; and besides, iny dear, I hope I know a mermaid when I see it. ' " Well," said Mrs, Ellison, *' it was no mermaid, 272 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. it was a mistake ; and I'm going to see about it Will you go with me, Richard ? " " No money could induce me ! If it 's a mistake, it isn't proper for me to go ; if it 's a mermaid, it 'a dangerous." " O you coward ! " said the intrepid little woman to a hero of all the fights on Sherman's march to the sea ; and presently they heard her attack the mysterious enemy with a lady-li^e courage, claim- ing the invaded chamber. The foe replied with like civility, saying the clerk had given her that room with the understanding that another lady was to be put there with her, and she had left the door unlocked to admit her. The watchers with the sick man next door appeared and confirmed this speech , a feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to it. " Of course," added the invader, " if I'd known 'ow it really was, I never would 'ave listened to such a thing, never. And there isn't another 'ole in the 'ouse to lay me 'ead," she concluded. " Then it 's the clerk's fault," said Mrs. Ellison, glad to retreat unharmed ; and she made her hus- band ring for the guilty wretch, a pale, quiet young Frenchman, whom the united party, sallying into the corridor, began to upbraid in one breath, the lady in dishabille vanishing as often as she remem- bered it, and reappearing whenever some strong joint of argument or denunciation occurred to her The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked tribe, threw himself upon their mercy and confessed QUEBEC. 278 everything : the house was so crowded, and he had been so crazed by the demands upon him, that he had understood Colonel Ellison's application to be for a bed for the young lady in his party, and he had done the very best he could. If the lady there she vanished again would give up the room to the two gentlemen, he would find her a place with the housekeeper. To this the lady consented with- out difficulty, and the rest dispersing, she kissed one of the sick man's watchers with " Isn't it a shame, Bella ? " and flitted down the darkness of the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all, save the two assigned our travellers, to be occupied by ladies of the troupe ; their doors successively opened, and 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 ap- peared no more than herself to find any humorous cast in the affair, they received her narration with the same amiability. They uttered their sympathy seriously, and each parted from her with some friendly word. Then all was still. . "Richard," said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel's room the travellers had briefly celebrated these events, " I should think you'd hate to leave us alone ap here." " I do ; but you can't think how I hate to go off ilone. I wish you'd come part of the way with u*, M 274 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. ladies ; I do indeed. Leave your door unlocked, at any rate/' This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room, was answered from within by a sound of turning keys and sliding bolts, and a low thunder as of bu- reaus and washstands rolled against the door. " The ladies are fortifying their position,'' said the Colonel to Basil, and the two returned to their own chamber. " I don't wish any intrusions," he said, instantly shutting himself in ; " my nerves are too much shaken now. What an awfully mysterious old place this Quebec is, Mr. March ! I'll tell you what : it 's my opinion that this is an enchanted castle, and if my ribs are not walked over by a muleteer in the course of the night, it 's all I ask," In this and other discourse recalling the famous adventure of Don Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the labor of disrobing, and had got as far as his boots, when there came a startling knock at the door, With one boot in his hand and the other on his foot, the Colonel limped forward. " I suppose it 's that clerk has sent to say he 's made some other mistake," and he flung wide the door, and then stood motionless before it, dumbly staring at a fig- ure on the threshold, a figure with the fringed forehead and pale blue eyes of her whom they had BO lately turned out of that room. Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, u Ex- cuse me, gentlemen," she said, with a dignity that recalled their scattered senses, " but will you 'ave QUEBEC. 275 the goodness to look if my beads are on your table ? O 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 fco you, gentlemen, and I hask a thousand pardons for troublin' you," she concluded in a somewhat severe tone, that left them abashed and culpable ; and vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared. "Now, see here," said the Colonel, with a huge sigh as he closed the door again, and this time locked it, "I should like to know how long this sort of thing is to be kept up ? Because, if it 's to be regularly repeated during the night, I'm going to dress again." Nevertheless, he, finished undressing and got into bed, where he remained for some timb silent. Basil put out the light. " O, I'm sorry you did that, my dear fellow," said the Colonel ; " but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no doubt. It 'a my belief that in the landlord's extremity of bed- linen, I've been put to sleep between a pair of fca- ble-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 under- Death. 1 wish they had given me mates. It ' pretty hard having to sleep between odd table- cloths. I shall complain to the lan