CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY STEPHEN E. WHICHER MEMORIAL BOOK COLLECTION Gift of MRS. ELIZABETH T. WHICHER UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY Date Due -SEMESTER BOQIf SEMESTER BOOK PRINTED IN (ttf NO. 23233 Cornell University Library PS 2025.T31 1888 Their wedding journey :w'«Ji a" at)** 9"^ „ „,iiiiiiiiiin 1111111111 mil II 3 1924 014 419 612 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014419612 ^oofeB ip 5lJ5StUtam Dean j^otoclls, VENETIAN LIFE. Holiday Edition. Illustrated, z vols. i2mo, $5.00. The Same. i2mo, $1.50. Riverside A Idine Edition. 2 vols. i6mo, $2.00. First Edition, $3.00. ITALIAN JOURNEYS. i2mo, $1.30. TUSCAN CITIES. New Edition. lamo, J1.50. THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. JUsw Holiday Edition. Illus- trated. Crown 8vo, ^3.00. The Same. Illustrated. izmo, $1.50. The Same. i8mo, Si. 00. A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE. 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A Comedy. i8mo,Ji.25. OUT OF THE QUESTION. A Comedy. iSrao, $1.25. CHOICE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES. Edited, and with Critical and Biographical Essays, by Mr. Howeli.s. 8 vols. i8mo, each, $i.qo. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY W. D. HOWELLS AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOURNEYS" ETC., ETC. "WITH AN ADDITIONAL CHAPTER ON NIAGARA REVISITED ILLUSTRATED BY AUGUSTUS HOPPIN BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (Cfe Bibet^ibe ^ni^, ffambriboe 1898 CopyrigW, 1871 and 1888, By W. D. HOWBLLS. All rights reserved. 3 ^^5 5^^ J CONTENTS. 4 FAGE I. The Outset .1 11. A MiDsusikBK-DAY's Dream , . . . • » • 35 III. The Night Boat 56 IV. A Day's Eaileoadiko 80 V. The Enchanted City, and beyond . • , . . 97 VI. Niagaea ^^^ VII. Down the St. Lawrence . . . . ■ • • • ^'■^ VIII. The Sentiment of Montreal 1^^ IX. . . • 228 Quebec iv CONTENTS. X. HOMEWAED AND HOME , 279 XI. Niagara Revisited, Twelve Teaks after their Wedding Journey 288 THEIR WEDDLN"G JOUENEY. THE OUTSET. They first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where they aiterwarda 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 Bustaiaed or involved narration ; though I am persuaded that a skillful romancer could turn the courtship of BasU. and Isabel March to excellent account. Fortunately for rr.e, however, in attempt- Z THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. bg to tell the reader of the wedding -journey of a newly married couple, no longer very young, to be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall have nothing to do but to talk of some ordi- nary traits of American Ufe 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 aU 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 ahaU go just like anybody else, — with a difference, dear, with a difference 1 " 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 Ufe, sat substantial between them. It was rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added, with a conscious blush, "We are past our first youth, you know ; and we shall not strike the public as bridal, shall we ? My one horror in life is an ev- ident bride." THE OUTSET. 8 Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to be taken for a bride ; and for my part I do not object to a woman's being of Isa- bel's age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have been very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when they met first, eight years before ; but he could not help recurring with an inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken engage- ment, which but for that fatality they might have spent together, he imagined, in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted him, more or less ; it was part of his love ; the loss accounted irreparable reaUy enriched the final gain. " I don't know," he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can whose cheeks are clasped between a lady's hands, " you don't begin very well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this way, they will put us into the ' bridal chambers ' at all the hotels. And the cars — they're beginning to have them on the palace-cars." Just then a shadow fell into the room. " Wasn't that thunder, Isabel ? " asked her airnt, who had been contentedly surveying the ten- der spectacle before her. " O dear I you'll never be able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It 's actually raining now 1 " In fact, it was tne beginning of that terrible itorm of June, 1870. All in a moment, out ot the 4 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. hot sunflhine of the day it burst upon us before Tfe 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 aU ; 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 haU-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 aU that day, and decided to go and not to go, according to the changing complexion of the elements. BasU had gaid 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 coiild 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 kiad 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 of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning d THEIB WEDDING JOUBNEY. caused Isabel to seize her husband's arm, and to implore him, " O don't go by the boat ! " On this, Basil had the incredible weakness to yield; and bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot. It was the first swerving from the ideal in their wedding journey, but it was by no means the last ; though it must be confessed that it was early to begin. They both felt more tranquil when they were irretrievably committed by the purchase of their tickets, and when they sat down in the waiting- room of the station, with all the time between 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 haK 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 1 Do you remember how long we had to wait at Chambdry ? 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 wife and the two children, and a tarnished uniform ? He seemed to be somehow in misfortune, and his mustache hung down in such a spiritless way, while all the other military mustaches about curled and bristled with so much boldness. I think salles d'attente 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, BasU, 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 TiiTn in a way that threatened betrayal of her bri- dal character. "Isabel, you wiU be having your head on my shoulder, next," said he. " Never I " she answered fiercely, recovering her distance with a start. " But, dearest, if you do see me going to — act absurdly, you know, do stop me '•I'm very sorry, but I've got myself to stop. Bemdes, I didn't undertake to preserve the incog- nito of this bridal party," If any accident of the sort dreaded had reaUy happened, it would not have mattered so much, for «8 yet they were the sole occupants of the waiting THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. room. To be suxe, the ticket-Beller was there, and the lady who checked packages left in her charge , but these mast have seen so many endearments pass between passengers, that a fleeting caress or THE OUTSET. 9 No would scarcely have drawn their notice to otu 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- pmess 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 Kke themselves upon a "pleasure tour, which also was evidently one of the first tours of any Idnd that they had made. It was of modest extent, and comprised going to New York and back ; but they talked of it with a flut- tered and joyful expectation as if it were a voyage to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque of their happiness (but with a touch of tragedy) in that kind of young man who is called by the fe- males of his class a fellow, and two young women of that kind known to him as girls. He took a place between these, and presently began a robust flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself, after a brief struggle, of her parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with a sort of tender rude- ness, inconceivable vapidities, such as you would expect from none but a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus courted became selfishly unconscious ot everything but her own joy, and made no at- tempt to bring the other girl within its warmth. 10 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNEY. 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 1 " " 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, vrho took them as so many compliments to their prudence in not going by the boat, and who had secret doubts of their wisdom whenever these 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 Accoimt 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 aU 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 ia every one, that it would be hard to say whether they were more concerned in an old gentleman with vigorously upright iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, and reading all the evening papers, or a young man who hurled himseK through the door, bought a ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and then ran dovm 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 fanuly for generations. 12 THEIB WEDDING JOTJBNET. imd felt bound if any harm befell him to go ano break the new8 gently to his parents, their nerves could not have been more intimately VTTOught 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 BrookHne, 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 comer 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 stUl had an hour to wait. Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a 8u1>- 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'U go," he exclaimed, " because it isn't bridal, and will help us to pass for old married people." " No, no, Basil, be honest ; fibbing isn't your forte : I wonder you went into the insurance busi- ness ; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps, or think you may be so before we get to New York, I shaU amuse myself well enough here." I suppose it is always a little shocking and grieT- 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 vrith the ideal her husband's capacity for breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at aU 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 their European travels during their first engage- ment. " Yes, he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too fuU of the notion of getting into Italy to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I 14 THEIR WEDDINQ JOUBKET. tbongM I must break with him on account ol the wild-boar ; and at Heidelberg, the sausage and the ham I — how could he, in my presence? But I took him with aU 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. 15 that indiyidual traits were merged in the cliaxacter 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 oi manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The ticket-seller's stamp clicked incessantly as he sold tickets to aU. 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 ofE to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also ia 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 yov, 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 piUows 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 JOUENET. In spirit our happy friends bowed themselTCS before it and owned that there was something better than happiness in it. " What is it like, Isabel ? " " O, I don't know, darling," she said ; but she thought, " Perhaps it is like some blessed sorrow that takes us out of this prison of a world, and seta us free of our eyery-day hates and desires, our aims, our fears, ourselves. Maybe a long and mor- tal sickness might come to wear such a face in one of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret the poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had fallen away." She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whose face beamed a tender smile, as Isabel spoke to her. A chord thrilled in two lives hitherto 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- «ion 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 I " 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 traiQ 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 tlie 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 ia 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 Bob upon one another's necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the same strain ? " " O no I she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a blessed life. Perhaps it 18 THEIB WEDDING JOUENET. was that made me shed those few small tears. She seemed a very religious person." " Yes," said Basil, " it is ahnost 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 imder 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 yoQ THE OUTSET. 19 can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only khat 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, sleepuig 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 weU-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 stu' uneasily at the sound of your train's departing whistle ; and so aU 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 sm-prised at the decency of their appearance, and Isabel said, " I 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 hour* 20 THEIE WEDDING JOURNEY just wandering about." She was a womaii who loTed 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 BasO., who was always charmed with these smaU 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 then go round to Leonard's, who wUl be able to give us just '"hree unhurried seconds. After that we'll push on out to his place." THE OUTSET. 21 At that early hour there were not many people astir on the Avide avenue down which oux friends BtroUed 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, stiU wanted the brisknesa 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 comer-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 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caiight upon the elbow of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning's news is snatcheiU whilst the person sways lightly with the walk ; ia the street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were rows of people with baskets between their legs and THE OUTSET. 28 papers before tlieir 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's terror began, the oblivipn of sleep. As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet deeper seclusion, Basil began to utter in a musing tone: — " A city against the world's gray Prime, Lost in some 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 ef Art, — Were not more lone to one who first Upon its giant silence burst. Than this strange quiet, where the tide Of life, upheaved on either side. Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat With human waves the Morning Street." " How lovely 1 " 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 I a poet's," answered her husband, " a man of whom we shall one day any of us be glad to say that we liked him before he was famous. What a 24 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. nebulous sweetness tlie first lines have, and what a clear, cool light of day-break in the last I " " 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 aU, 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 BO 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 in those clothes.' '0,' she moaned out, ' you ased 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 Hne 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 aU 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-sMrt clicking against each step of the stairway, as she went slowly and heayily down to the street." "0 don't — donH, BasU," 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 1 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 gods, but had been invaded at more 26 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNET. 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 fillin g 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 to hide it. To these belonged the frowzy serving- women ; to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit children and mothers of the streets were 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- some 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 is all but impossible not to -wish to stand weU 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 with the conviction that, if he was not a New Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the world at any rate. Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this man of the world continued his pilgrimage down Broadway, which even in that desert state was full of a certaiu 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 ; carta were struggling up the slopes of vast cellars, with loads of distracting rubbish ; here stood the haK- demoHshed walls of a house, with a sad variety of waU-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 ita place. As yot these forces of demohtion and con- Btniction had the business of the street almost to themselves. " Why, how shabby the street is ! " said Isabel, at last. " When I landed, after being abroad, I remember that Broadway impressed me with its splendor." 28 THEIB WEDDING -JOUBNET. " Ah I but you were merely coining from Ea- 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, beUeved her husband the only man able to have thoroughly baffled the mahgnity 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. " stuff ! " she retorted, "as if I had any of that siUy 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'U 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 tc be an Irish councilman, that I might have some right to the pride I felt in the capital of the Irish RepubUc. 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, lie iTiles 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 ahghted, there was already a bustle that nothing but a fire could have created at the same hour in Boston. A little farther on the steeple of Trinity rose high into the scorching sun- light, while below, in the shadow that was darker than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among their flowers. " How still they he ! " mused the happy wife, peering through the iron fence in passing. " Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poor things ! " said Basil ; and through both their minds flashed the wonder if they should ever come to Bomething like that ; but it appeared so impossible that they both smiled at the absurdity. " It 's too early yet for Leonard," continued 80 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. Basil ; " what a pity the church-yard is locksd 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 ft 's historical, and it 's open, — where these drowsy friends of ours used to take the air when they were in the fashion, and had' some occasion for the ele- ment in its freshness. You can imagine — it's cheap — how they used to see Mr. Burr and Mr. Hamilton down theres." AH places that fashion has once loved and aban- doned are very melancholy ; but of aU such places, I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are there some sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots ? I believe so, but I do not make sure ; I am certain only of the mangy grass-plots, or rather the spaces between the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morn- ing when our friends, with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hun- grj'-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 ment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gare 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 dovsru the boarding-house scale through various unhomelike occupations to final dishonor and despair. Dovm nearer the water, and not far from the castle that was once a playhouse and is 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 32 THEIB WEDDINU JOUBKET foot for the first time on tiis tappy continent Fancy his rapture on beholding this lovely spot, ana these charming American faces I What a smiling aspect Ufe 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 yon for bringing me. But if you don't think of any other New York delights to show me, do let us go and sit m Leonard's office till he comes, and then get out into the coimtry 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 whUing 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 himseK or any one else ; and then they both upbraided the city's bigness and dullness with an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know. They particularly derided the notion of New York's being loved by any one. It was immense, it was grand in some ways, parts of it were exceedingly handsome ; but it was too vast, too coarse, too rest- less. They could imagine its being liked by a suc- i^essful young man of business, or by a rich young girl, ignorant of life and with not too nice a taste in her pleasures ; but that it should be dear to any THE OUTSET. 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 grovring more and more conscious of herself, waking from her night's sleep and becoming aware of her fleets and trains, and the myriad hands and wheels that throughout the whole sea and land move for her, and do her will even while she sleeps. AU about the wedding- joumeyers 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 iateresting multitude of strangers arrived by the early boats and trains, and that easily distinguishable class of lately New- Yorkized people from other places, about whom in the metropolis still hung the provincial traditions of early rising ; and over aU, from moment to moment, the eager, audacious, well-dressed, proper life of the aiighty 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 34 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. anew, till it filled tlie world in which theie was room for nothing but the strangeness that they ehould 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 dty 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 hart the feelings of a spider." n. A midsttmmbb-day's debam. They had waited to see Leonard, in order that they might leam better how to find hia house ia the coun- try ; and now, when they came in upon him at nine o'clock, he welcomed them with aU 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 kiad of down-town parlor ; but after they had briefly accounted to his 86 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had boasted of the original fashion ia 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 teU me, BasU," said Isabel, " that Leon- ard travels fifty miles every day by rail going to and from his work ! " " I must, dearest, if I would be truthful." " Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at the South End, 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 mtdsummee-day's dream. 37 now that they had come together, their only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in every Ught 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 reflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the former aa the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as their great-grand- mothers could have been in the same circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other in their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. "Do you really suppose, Basil," Isabel would say to her oppressor, after hav- ing given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon husbands, " that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have been married ten years ? Lucy says that things go more 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 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. palms against his, and gave a vehement little push — " there is something agreeable about it, even a^ this stage of the proceedings." " Isabel," said her husband, with severity, " this is 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 in their daily existence. The sub- urbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction ; and everywhere are handsome villas hke Leonard's, inhabited by men like him- self, whom strict study of the time-table enables to Bpond 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 MIDSUMMEB-DAY'S DREAM. 89 luxls put on their best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the \dsit, said guests and hosts, they were aU 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 Ught 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." 10 THEm WEDDING JOUBNET. They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat of the coimtry 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. AU abroad burned the fierce white light of the sun, in which Qot only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but A midsummer-day's dkeam. 41 the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long journeys from broiling cities of the "West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another ; after every station the des- perate conductor swung through the long aisle aud punched the ticket, which each passenger seeme 68 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. parently the worse for the ordeal they had passed thrdugh, were of a light, conversational temper. " What an amusingly superb affair I " 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 sElfety, or are we really a nation of priuces in disguise ? Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter," he added. " I am BpoUt for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour ; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and a humble three-story sweU-front up at the South End is no longer the place for me. iJearest, " 'Let ns Bwear an oath, and keep it with an eqnal 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 pubhc provision which, leaving no in- terval between disgraceful squalor and ludicrone splendor, accommodates our democratic mSnage to the taste of the richest and most extravagant ple- beian amongst us. He, rmhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the •teamboat berth into which he gets with his pan- THE NIGHT BOAT. 69 talooDS on, and out of which he may be blown by on exploding boiler at any moment ; it is he who wiU have for supper that overgrown and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon, and will not let any one else buy tea or toast for a less sum than he pays for his surfeit ; it is he who perpetuates the insolenc* of the clerk and the reluctance of the waiters ; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with his womenldnd, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel sit. Personally, he is not BO 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 iu 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 sufEerable 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- isked it about the house-tops, and in the faces of the arriving passengers, who, as the moment of depart- Ve drew near, appeared in constantly increasing numbers and iu greater variety, with not only the trepidation of going upon them, but also with the electrical excitement people feel before a tempest. 60 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNEY. The breast of the black cloud was now zigzagged from moment to moment by hghtning, and claps oi 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 vnth 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 I if we had only taken the day boat ! " moaned Isabel. " Now, we shall see nothing of the river landscape, and we shaU. 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 Rhiue." Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured couple, that thiey would be just even to the elements, which had by no means been generous to them ; and they ovmed 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 Iheir places with a largely increased compan iouship on the deck. THE NIGHT BOAT. 61 They had already reached that part oi the river where the uplands begin, and their course waa be- tween stately walls of rocky steepness, or wooded dopes, 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, Hghts 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 hiUs. Behind them stretched the great gray river, haunted -with 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 THEIB WEDDING JODBNET. 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 Kke 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 itseK. 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 Btni with lingering glances of self -recognition and enjoyment. They divined rightly that one of the main conditions of their present felicity was the fact that they had seen so much of time and of the world, that they had no longer any desire to take behold- ing eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure, and they understood that theii prosperous love ac- counted as much as years and travel for this result. If they had had a loftier opinion of themselves, their indifference to others might have made them offensive ; but with their modest estimate of their own value in the world, they could have all the comfort of self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity. " O yes ! " said BasU, 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 1 never could see a young girl without hoping she would mistake me for something of that sort. I 64 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. couldn't help desiring tliat some fascination of mine, which had escaped my own analysis, would hare an effect upon her. I dare say all young men are so. I used to live for the possible interest I might inspire in your sex, Isabel. They controlled my movements, my attitudes ; they forbade me 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 vsrant any of these peo- ple to suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful, or well dressed, and do not care to show ofE in any sort of vray 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 w^as carrying on a vivacious flirtation with the ^oung man, who was apparently an acquaintance i)f brief standing ; the other was scarcely more than a fluid, 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 THK NIGHT BOAT. 65 neighborliood for beauty and wit. Tlie 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, I shonld »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.) B6 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. ' Giggles 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, oan I make others share the dehght I find iu thy foolish and iasipld 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 ycung men feel ia winning the favor of seniors in their voca tion. " Well, as T 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 (nake a man puy the goat you want him to, if he wands a goat, but tne thing is to make him puy 68 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. the goat that you wand to sell when he don^t wand no goat at all. You've asked me what I thought and I've dold you. Isaac'll never zngzeed in the redail glothing-business in the world! " " Well," sighed the elder, who filled his arm- chair quite fuU, and quivered with a comfortable jeUy-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 kiad to the yesterday's fluid of warmer hue. There was something pleasanter in the face of the hereditary aristocrat, but not bo strong, nor, altogether, so admirable ; particulaxly rHE NIGHT BOAT. 69 if you reflected that he really represented nothing in the world, no great culture, no political influ- ence, no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary force, nothing but a social set, an alien club-Ufe, 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, vnth 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 im- consciously caught flavors of Tennyson and Brown- ing in his verse, with a modemer tint from Morris for was it not a story out of mythology, vdth 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- accepted disappointments a moving little picture 70 THEIB WEDDING JOBKKET. of this poor imagined poet's adventures ; with -whai kindness and unkitidness 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, tUl he finds himseK longing for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor feUow I one compas- sionate cut-throat of a publisher even asked hiTn 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 aU passages of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery, with a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. AU the elements, indeed, of either were at work tVere, 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 mde burlesque, the bitter satire of the next ; but of all THE NIGHT BOAT. 7l these parodies none was so terribly effective as the two women, who sat in the midst of the company, yet were somehow distinct from the rest. One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other was dressed in bridal white, and they were both alike awful in their mockery of guiltless sorrow and guiltless joy. They were not old, but the soul of youth was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruin ancient as sin looked from their eyes ; their talk and laughter seemed the echo of an in- numerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land and time, each solitary forever, yet aU 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 nimibers 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 gla.88 drops of the chandeliers ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious feel- ing of coziness and security to our travellers. 72 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot's bell signalmg 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 for help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses. " Send out a boat 1 " " There was a woman aboard that steamboat 1 " " Lower your boats ! " " Run a craft right down, with your big boat I " " 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 I " 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 was not a man to be seen, for apparently they had THE NIGHT BOAT. 78 all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the calam- ity. A mist of sleep inTolved 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 BasU returned, it had be- come known to Isabel and the rest that their own steamer had suffered no harm, but that she had struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of canal-boats, from which those alarming cries and curses had come. The steamer was now lying by tor the small boats she had sent out to pick up the crew of the sunken vessel. " Why, I only heard a little t inkl ing 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 commoa tow-boat on a perfectly clear night like this there should have been no noise and no perceptible jar. rhey manage better on the Mississippi, and both boats often go down without waking the lightest sleeper on board." 74 THEIR WEDDING JOUENET. 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 me in, Basil," she said, with a bold meekness, " and if anything more happens don't wake me tiU 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 foUows 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, Hstened gravely to the voice of the common imbecility and incoherence. The principal speaker was a tail person, wearing ft silk travelling-cap. He had a face of stupid THE NIGHT BOAT. 76 benignity ana a self-satisfied smirk ; and he was formally trying to put ai 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 I 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 aunk 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 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap no-w 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, thor.ght, 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-ni'ght, but I almost al- ways undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my cvwn house," said the gentleman of the silk cap THE NIGHT BOAT. 7T " I 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 compromisiag 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. Thia 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 hoUow, moaning, gurgling sound, regular as that of the machinery, for some note of which he mistook it. " Clear the gangway there ! " shouted a gruff voice; "man scalded here!" And a burden was carried by from which fluttered, with its terrible regularity, that utterance of mortal an- guish. Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the morning come. 78 THEEB 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 his weariuess iu 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' ieem 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 Uttle more eiamestly 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 Hfe. He bade hia Boul 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 idght freezes all the air about it. But it was quite idle : where loye 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 moTementa that he loved, and bore him far away from the sad images that he had in- vited to mirror themselyes in it. IV. A day's EAtLEOADlNtt. HAPriNESS 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 ia the most fugitive and sketchy way. They decided at last, in view of the early depart- ure of the train, and the probability that they would be more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast at the station, and thither they went and took places Bt one of the many tables within, where they seemed A day's eaileoading. 81 to have been expected only by the flies. The wait- ress plainly had not looked for them, and for a time foimd their presence so incredible that she wunld not acknowledge the rattling that Basil was obliged to make on his glass. Then it appeared that the cook would not believe ha. them, and he did not send them, tUl they were quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee, the oily slices of fugacious potatoes sL'f ping about in their shallow dish and skillfully evading pursuit, the pieces of beef that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit, steaming eviHy up iuto the face when opened, and then soddening iuto 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 ia their cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the charao- tor and history of the materials of that breakfast. Presently Isabel paused, played a httle with her knife, and, after a moment, looked up at her hus- band with an arch regard and said : " I was just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where our train once stopped for break- s 82 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. fast. I remember the freshness and brightness of everything on the httle tables, — the plates, the napkins, the gleaming half-bottles of Avine. They seemed to have been preparing that breakfast foi us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly seated before they served us vdth great cups of caf6- aU'lait, and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and po- tatoes, — such potatoes ! Dear me, how little I ate of it ! I wish, for once, I'd had your appetite, Basil ; I do indeed." She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, de- spite the tragical contrast her words had suggested, Basil finally joined. So much amazement had probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted in that place ; but their lightness did not at all commend them. The waitress had not liked it from the first, and had served them with reluc- tance ; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon them as if he believed them about to escape without payment. Here, then, they had en- forced a great fact of travelling, — that people who serve the public are kindly and pleasant in propor- tion as they serve it well. The unjust and tihe Lnefiicient have always that consciousness of evil which wiU not let a man forgive his victim, or lika 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 EAILROADINa. 88 ihey 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 dehb- erately rejected the notion of a drawing -room car aa affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and aa being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite com- fortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to vie'B the scenery, into which they struck an hour, after leaving the city, with much complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open win- dow to make the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil pic- turesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any con- siderable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a graz- ing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River rippling down through aU, 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 wdth a whirl, and leaves slowly stepping forward and swiftly slipping backward. There are farms that had once, or still have, the reman ?.e to them of being Dutch farms, — if there ia any romance in that, — and one conjectures a Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain. Spaces of woodland here and there dapple the 84 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. slopes, and the cozy red farm-houses repose by tlie side of their capacious red barns. Truly, there is no ground on which to defend thg idleness, and yet as the train strives furiously onward amid these scenes of fertihty 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 seryed 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 ehn-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 aU the places, I have the peo- ple keep bees, and, in the garden fuU 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 KAILBOADING. 85 ing over it. I walk immolested through the farm- er's tall grass, and ride with him upon the perUoua Beat 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 is not tiTie. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hay- field, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal be- tide that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only because they are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-Up 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 stem of the boat up to the path, so that I can step on. She is laden with flour from the vaUey of the Genesee, and may have started on her voyage shortly after the c£^nal 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-ofE futuie of anival. Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes, but 1 am aware that less superficial epiiits could not be satisfied with them, and I io not pretend that my weddmg-joumeyers were ao. 86 THEIR WEDDING JOUENET. 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 aU 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 bieings, 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 wiU seek him in A dat's railroading. 87 his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very pre- cious ; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and a brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently iuto his Hfe and inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved by his dumbj 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 coim- try stations, carpet-bag in hand ; in women who came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands with or sheepishly kissed by those who hastUy got seats for them, and placed their bags or their ba- bies in their laps, and turned for a nod at the door ; in young ladies who were seen to places by yomig men (the latter seemed not to care if the train did go off with them), and then threw up 88 THEIB WEDDING JOUBNET. their windows and talked witli girl-friendu on tlie platform without, till the train began to moTe, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and moist red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it, and could not cabn themselves to the dull level of the travel around them ; ia the conductor, coldly and inacces- sibly vigilant, as he went his rounds, reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his head from time to time, and listened with a faint, sarcastic smile to the questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some information out of him ; in the train-boy, who passed through on his many errands with prize candies, gum-drops, pop-corn, papers and magazines, and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impar- tiaUty, 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 aU 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 paBBenpfers between London and Paris. And it A day's railroading. 89 seems true that on a westering line, the blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into increasing informality of 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 Tttood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any means of relieving their ennui ; or they felt thar 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-joumeyers caught fragments of the personal histories of their fellow-passengers which had been rehearsing to those that sat next the narrators. It was no more than fair that these should somewhat magnify themselves, and put the best complexion on their actions and the worst upon their suffer- ings ; that they should all appear the luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people 90 THEIR WEDDING JOUENEy. that ftver were, and should all have made or lost the most money. There was a prevailiiig 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 ofEense, 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, weU-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 kailroading. 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 hinn 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 Httle pounded ice -f- 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 aUve. 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, " 0, 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 8he 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 JOtHtNET. " Never mind, dear, never mind," lie 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 bailroading. 98 itself in abundance, variety, and wholusomeneas. 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. Prom table to table passed a calm- ing influence in the person of the proprietor, who, as he took his richly earned money, checked the rismg fears of the guests by re- peated proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he would give them due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beak and claw, as the vultuxe-like fashion is, upon every- thing in reach, remained to eat like Christians ; and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made a good dinner in spite of himself. " O Basil, Basil ! " cried Isabel, when the train *as again in motion, " have we really dined once 94 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. more ? It seems too good to be true. CleanlinesB, 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 afEectionatQ 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 their 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 typicax in this respect. I even imagine that ideal reader A day's bailroading. 95 for whom one ■writes as ya'wning over these barren details with. the life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence often suf&ced my wedded lovers, or then, when there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their love, which they were never tired of hearing as they severally knew it. Let it not be a reproach to human nature or to me if I say that there was something in the com- fort of having well dined which now touched the springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that they had never so rejoiced in these tender remi- niscences. They had planned to stop over at Rochester till the morrow, that they might arrive at Niagara by daylight, and at Utica they had suddenly resolved to make the rest of the day's journey in a drawing- room car. The change gave them an added reason for content ; and they realized how much they had previously sacrificed to the idea of travelling in the most American manner, without achieving it after all, for this seemed a touch of Americanism beyond the old-fashioned car. They reclined in luxury upon the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs ; they surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of the flying-parlor in which they sat, or turned their contented regard through the broad plate-glass windows upon the landscape without. They said that none but Americans or enchanted princes in the "Arabian Nights" ever travelled in such state ; 96 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and when tlie stewards of the car came round suc- cessirely with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret- punches, they felt a heightened assurance that they were either enchanted princes — or Americana. There were more ladies and more fashion than in the other cars ; and prettily dressed children played about on the carpet ; but the general appearance of the passengers hardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere ; and they were plainly in that car because they were of the American race, which finda nothing too good for it that its money can buy. V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BBYOKD. 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 trayellLng-bags, and led them to the omnibus. As they were his only passengers, the porter got inside with them, and seeing their interest in the streets through which they rode, he descanted in a strain of cheerful pride upon the city's prosperity and character, and gave the names of the people who lived in the finer houses, just as if it had been an Old-World town, and he some eager historian expecting reward for his comment upon it. He cast quite a glamoui T 98 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNEY. over Rochester, so tliat in passing a bodj 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 hke 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 weU- 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, touchted a bell for a caU-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 resumiag a conversation, " Well, she 's a mighty pooty gul, 4ny way, Chawley ! " When I reflect that this was a type of the bote! THE ENCHANTEP CITY, AND BEYOND. 99 oWk througliout the United States, that behind unnumbered registers at this moment he is snub> bing travellers into the dust, and that they are suf- fering and perpetuating him, I am lost in wonder at the national meekness. Not that I am one to p9- 100 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. fuse tlie humble pie his jeweled fingers offer me. Abjectly I take my key, and creep off up stairg after the call-boy, and try to give mjself the gen- teel air of one who has not been stepped upon. But I think homicidal things aU the same, and I rejoice that iu the safety of print I can cry out against the despot, whom I have not the presence to defy. " YouYulgar and cruel little soul," I say, and I imagine myseK 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 complaiu 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 iu 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, Bke you, like me, he shrank from asserting himself. Wlien 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 olerk was the sole blemish of the house. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 101 iHabel viewed -with innocent surprise the evi- dences of luxury afforded by all the appoiatments 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 ia 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 biU 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 v^ere giving. When these had been dispatched for Bteak, for broiled white-fish of the lakes, — noblest and delicatest of the fish that swim, — for broiled ohicken, for fried potatoes, for muffins, for whatever 102 THEIE WEDDING JOUENET. 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 lis empty and forlorn ? " plaintively murmured Isa- bel, as the menial train reappeared, bearing the Bupper 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 donH think, Basil," she faltered, " that they eould 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 stiU 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 unconunon favor, I think I can explain the cause. It has been dis- lovered by the register that we are from Boston, and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection, «nd hDraage which the name everywhere commands- THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BE70ND. 108 It 's our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and moral yirtue of Boston. This sup- per is not a tribute to you as a bride, but as a Bos- tonian." It was a cheap kiad of raillery, to be sure, but it Beived. It kindled the local pride of Isabel to self- dofense, and in the distraction of the efEort 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 ia the world, and nothing but banishment could make him hve 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 comer 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 exiat- 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 THEIE WEDDING JOUENEY. tavern, and iinable to repress his exultation in what Beemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed to have iavited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his Boul ; it was what might have happened in Italy, only there so much naivet4 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 1 " 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 her graceful head lifted to look into his ; they saw Mm with his arm yet stretched across to the leaves of music he had been turning, and hia face lowered to meet her gaze. " Ah, BasU, 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, as we read in our guide, an immense flour interest, a great railroad entrepdt, an unrivaled nursery trade, a university, two commercial colleges, three collegi- ate institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I dare say any respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over his city. But Rochester is for us, who don't know it at all, a city of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over piano-fortes, of a palatial hotel with 106 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. pastoral waiters and porters, — a city of handsome streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of the golden age. The only definite association with it in our minds is the tragically romantic thought that here Sam Patch met his fate." *' And who in the world was Sam Patch ? ' " Isabel, your ignorance of aU that an American woman should be proud of distresses me. Have you reaUy, then, never heard of the man who in- vented the saying, ' Some things can be done as weU as others,' and proved it by jumping over Niagara FaUs twice ? Spurred on by this belief, he attempted the leap of the Genesee Falls. The leap was easy enough, but the coming up again was another matter. He failed in that. It was the one thing that could not be done as well as others." " Dreadful I " said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. " But what has all that to do with Rochester ? " " Now, my dear I You don't mean to say you didn't know that the Genesee FaUs were at Roch- ester ? Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we're within ten minutes' walk of them now." " Then walk to them at once I " cried Isabel, wholly imabashed, 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, AMD BEIOND. 107 Sayiug this, she persuaded herself that a chief object of their journey had been to \dsit 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 gives access to the best view of the cataract. The Americans have characteristically bordered the river with manufactures, making every drop work its passage to the brink ; while the Germans have as characteristically made use of the beauty left over, and have built a Bierhaus where they may regale both soul and sense in the presence of the cataract. Our travellers might, in another mood and place, have thought it droll to arrive at that sublime spectacle through a Bierhaus, 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 aex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lagei 108 THEIK WEDDING JOURNET. before them, and slim flasks of Rhenisli ; 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-joumeyers 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 kniyes 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-groimd they were led by the little maid, their guide, to a small paviKon that stood on the edge of the precipitous shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls. As they entered this pavihon, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers, passed out, and they were left alone with that sublime presence. Something of definitenesa 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 aU the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe away from the brink of the cataract, and then dea- 110 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. perately breaking and perishing to fall, the white disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the Tast and deep ravine through which the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed to maaa themselves a himdred feet high iu 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 ia some rare and fantastic shape ; and its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the great town on the other shore, the station vrith 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 hia 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 tUl 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 Jonea THE EWCHANTED 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 caU it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to bo 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 whotse relics we see here." On a table before them stood a pair of beer- glasses, in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the foam of the generous liquor lately brimmiug them ; some 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 waa in Arkadien geboren. 112 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEr. ' ' In the Bierhausgarten I linger By the Falls of the Genesee : From the Table-Bock in the middl* Leaps a figure bold and free. mimiMi^ ■' JUoof in the air it rises O'er the rash, 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 horera and poises Aloof in the moonlit air ; As light as mist from the rapids. As heavy as nightmare. " ' In angnish 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 und frei,' I made it 'Leaps a figure bold and free.' " As they passed through the house on their way out, they saw the youth and maiden they had met at the pavilion door. They were seated at a table ; two glasses of beer towered before them ; on their plates were odorous crumbs of Limburger cheese. They both wore a pensive air. The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the whole earth was gone with the moonlight. By nine o'clock, when the wedding-journeyers resumed their way toward Niagara, the heat had already set in with the effect of ordinary midsummer's heat at high noon. The car into which they got had come the past night from Albany, and had an air of al- 114 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. most conscious stabbiness, griminess, and over-use. The seats were covered with cinders, which also crackled under foot. Dust was on everything, especially the persons of the crumpled and weary passengers of overnight. Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lighten the spiritual gloom, and presently they sank into the common bodily wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated, and as it drew nearer Buffalo they knew the con- ductor to have abandoned himself to that blackest of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick lateral motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusta 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, shriU-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 Hke the handles of a jar, on the other side, about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept fiUed with packages on the pretense that kt was engaged. It was a loud and fierce quarrei mongh, but it won no sort of favor ; and when the THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 115 Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no lady, and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied, " Highly complimen- tary, I must say," there was no sign of relief or other acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that there had been a quarrel. There was a little more interest taken in the mia- fortune of an old purblind German and his son, who were found by the conductor to be a few hun- dred miles out of the direct course to their destina- tion, and were with- some trouble and the aid of an Americanized fellow-countryman made aware of the fact. The old man then fell back iu the prevailing apathy, and the child naturally cared nothing. By and by came the unsparing traia-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 I " The German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated, " Ten cents I ten cents ! " with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled. When it had passed through the alien's nead that he was to pay for this national gift and he took with his tremulous fingers from the recesses of his pocket-book a ten- 116 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. cent note and handed it to his tormenxor, aome of the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other with eyee 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 I What ferocious imbeciles we are I 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 I 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 tlierriselves with several hours' time on their hands before the train started for Niagara, and in the first moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into say THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND. 117 lug, " 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 cominp^ thia 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 feehng for you." This romantic f eehng 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 aUy 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 wUl not live at Rochester, as I thought last night ; we'll come to Buffalo." She found that the place had aU 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 BO smooth, faded into the sky at last, with na 118 THEIB WEDDING JOUENEY. line between sharper than that which divides drow* ing from dreaming. But the color was the most charming thing, that dehcate blue of the lake, without the depth of the sea-blue, but infinitely fi fier 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 splenlor and aw- fnlneas to be revealed. VT. NIAGAKA. As the train stopped, Isabel's heart beak with a child-like ex- ultation, as I beheve 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 shaU be stunned with it before you leave," promised her husband ; and, not whoUy 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. Digness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings. The immense caravansaries swelling up from among the little bazaars (where they sell feather fans, and miniature bark canoes, and jars and vases and bracelets and brooches carved out of the local rocks), made our friends with their trunks very conscious of their disproportion to the accommoda- tions of the smallest. They were the sole occu- pants of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be received at their hotel with a burst of min- strelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt that a single stringed instrument of some timid note would have been enough ; and Basil was go- ing to express his own modest preference for a jew's-harp, when the music ceased with a sudden clash of the cymbals. But the next moment it burst out with fresh sweetness, and in alighting they perceived that another omnibus had turned the comer 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-kinga 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 stopping at this hotel, or else they were aU out NIAGAKA. 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 the pleasant quarters assigned them. There was time before supper for a glance at the cataract, and aftel 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 feeUng of arrival at a sub- lime destination. In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank with Rome, the metropoHs of history and rehgion ; 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 quahty of aggression, as there always seems to be in minor places as well as in minor men, and you gratefully accept its sublimity as a fact in no way contrasting with your own insignificance. Our friends were beset of course by many car- riage-drivers, whom they repelled with the kindly firmness of experienced travel. Isabel even felt a compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Ni- agara so much as to have forgotten that the first time one must see it alone or only with the next of fi-iendship. She was voluble in her pity of Basil that it was not as new to him as to her, till be- tween the trees they saw a white cloud of spray, »hot through and through with sunset, rising, rising, 122 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and slie 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 futUe 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 tUl the last, and the marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at once through a single sense, all the more fuUy 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 htt'e in- stant, as she looked along the verge from the water that caressed the shore at her feet before it flung itself down, to the wooded point that divides the MIAGABA. 123 American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which •howed dimly through its veil of golden and silTer 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 soid 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 laugliing and joking. They were a pic- nic party of rule, siUy folks of the neighborhood, ind she stood pondering them in sad wonder if anything could be worse, when she heard a voi^e 124 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. 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 int,o the ground ; you could see it was going to be a splendid photograph. Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trust- ing as usual to his sympathy for perception of her train of thought, " Well, I'll never try to be high- strung again. But shouldn't you have thought, dearest, that 1 might expect to be high-strung with success at Niagara if anywhere?" She passively followed him into the long, queer, downward-slop- ing edifice on the border of the grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood ready, and descended the incline. Emerging into the light again, she found herseK 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 MAGARA. 12S rockft; 80 bare beyond the spray, so green and moBsy within the faU of mist. But in another 126 THEIE WEDDING JOUKNET. breath she forgot them, as she looked on that diz- zied sea, hurling itself from the high summit in huge white knots, and breaks and masses, 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 outHne 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 capriciousnesa in their senses, and of a tendency of each to pal- ter with the thiags perceived. The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality, and now be- held the tumbling deluge as a Gothic waU of carven marble, white, motionless, and now as a faU 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 NUGABA. 137 great or Kttle ; the prevailing softness of the cata- ract's tone seemed so mucli 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 hps, 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 coidd make himself heard. " We will try the bridge next." Over the river, so stUl 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 hght- est, most ethereal ; it is ideally graceful, and droops from its sHght towers Uke 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 Pall 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 wildnSss 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 128 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. river on the American side, and greatly help the right-seer's pleasure in the place. The exquisite Btructure, which sways so tremulously from its- towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth where its cables sink into the ground, is to other bridges what the blood horse is to the common breed of roadsters ; and now they felt its sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them as they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their sympathy with the bridge's trepidation was too great for unalloyed delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there ; and afterwards, at least, they would not have had their airy path seem more secure. The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that sprung from the base of the Falls with a mournful, tremulous grace, and a movement weird as the 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 dear green on the face of the cataract was here more like lich 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 elimb from ledge to ledge, tiU 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 FaU, and the green massive curve of the Horse-Shoe, solid and simple and cahn 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 poa- sess itself of all, and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air like a fihny web, scarce more pass- able than the rainbow that flings its arch above tha mists. On the portico of the hotel they found half a 130 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. score 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 comer; 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, vnth 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 leen by the three people who entered soon after, and halted in the centre of the room. " Why, Kitty ! " said one of the two ladies who must be in any travelling-party of three, " this is more inappropriate to your gorgeous array than the snpper-room, even." She who was called Kitty was armed, as for so- KIAtiABA. 181 (rial conquest, in some kind of airy evening-dresa, and was looking round with bewilderment upon that forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a smile, that she had not seen ao 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 cabn, and who seemed resolved to make the most of the worst, " it isn't probable that the hotel will fiU. up overnight ; and I feel personally responsible for this state of things. Wh.0 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- contiaued 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, Mid 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 popidation. 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 bfe more people ? Per- haps Niagara isn't as fashionable as it used to be." 132 THEBS WEDDING JOUENET. " It looks somethiQg like that." " Well, what under the sun do you think t« 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 tha most fashionable." " I know it. I didn't want to come here for that reason. But fortune fayors the brave." " Well, it 's too bad ! Here we've asked Batty to come to Niagara with us, just to give her a little peep iato 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, Faimy," 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 say I ihould have gone to the other place. But never NIA6ABA. 188 mind. Kitty knows ■whom to blame, I hope. She 's your cousin," Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently folded ia 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 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 sHence, " I could lend her some things," she said musingly. " But don't speak of it to-night, please. It's too ridiculous. Kitty I " 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 •"/hen, "with dismay, " How can I ? " " Why, very weU, I think. You've got this xress, and your travelling-suit ; and I can lend yoa whatever you want. Come ! " she added joyously, " let 's go up to your room, and talk it over 1 " 134 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. Tte 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 en • 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 aU sorts of gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find her on your hands in a desolation like this. It 's dreadful, I think." Basil stared. " O, certainly," he said. " But what an amusingly illogical little body 1 " " I don't imderstand what you meain, 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 lier 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 explaoA' tion. NUOABA. 185 " O I " 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 1 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 tho lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers and their carriages to let, and the little shops, wit\ 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 in an eddy of which their love it- BeK had opened its white blossom, and lily-like dreamed upon the wave. They were now also part of the great circle oi newly wedded bliss, which, involving the whole land durinfij the season of bridal-tours, may be said 136 THEIR WEDDING JOUENET. to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costlj 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 tliure, and must discern a ceriiain immodesty in his intrusion. Is it for his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility must desire to Teil 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 skirts I What is Niagara to these things ? NIAGARA. 187 i rrn I I xne™ -^y^aa not willing to own her bridal sister- hoov °* l^hese blessed souls ; but she secretly re- joicecf'^^^^lt, even while she joined Basil in noting their nuimper and smiling at their innocent abandon. She droppiKJiis arm at encounter of the first couple, and walled carelessly at his side ; she made a solemn yoW never to take hold of his watch -clwvin in speakijig to him ; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting her face very close to hiB at dimmer in studying the bUl of fare ; getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the wi 1st. 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, smiling sphinx-hke over their laps full of bead-work, and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation pon the passers. They wore bright kirtle«, and led shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and down their comfortable pers^ms. A little girl with them was attired in like gayety »f color. " What is her name ? " asked Isabel, 138 THEIR WEDDING JOTJENET. paying for a bead pincushion. " Daisy icostlj ," said her mother, in distressingly good t^ fact^sh. » But her Indian name ? " " She has .J^^ny rv," an- swered the woman, who told Basil that ilamer village numbered five hundred people, and tha^J t^ey were Protestants. While they talked they v^Jok'ere joined by an Indian, whom the women salutedj ™ musically in their native tongue. This was some\d.what con- soling ; but he wore trousers and a waisu'^e'-.oat, and it could have been wished that he had nol?bt a sUk hat on. ^pd. " Still," said Isabel, as they turned awayA?^ " I'm glad he hasn't Lisle-thread gloves, like that^uei- ' tain we saw putting his forest queen on board the train at Oneida. But how shocking that they should be Christians, and Protestants ! It would have been bad enough to have them Catholics. And that woman said that they were increasing. They ought to be fading away." On the bridge, they paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their wild variety, with the white crests of breaking suif , the dark massiveness of heavy-cHmbing waves, the fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools. Spell-bound, the joumeyers pored upon the death- fal course beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the horror of being cast upon it, and then hurried over the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose wildness they sought refuge from the sight and sound. NIAGARA. 189 There liad been rain in the night ; the air was full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twittering birils. Presently they came to a bench set in a comer of the path, and commanding a pleasant yista of sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam of the foaming river beyond. As they sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their courtship, began to recite a poem. It was one which had been haunting him since his first sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart in his youth — the rhyme of some poor news- paper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clip- ping his name from the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil's memory, rather from the inter- est -of the awful fact it recorded, than from any merit of its own ; and now he recalled it with a distinctness that surprised him. AVERT. All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore, Heard, or seemed to hear, through the mtiltitudinons roar, Ont of the heU 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 Baying round him and past, the visage of a man Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caoght Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught- Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clang ? Shrili, above all the tumult the answering terror rung. 140 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. II. Under tfis weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is droTra«S, 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 lanndl 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 laat, And to its proven strength he Isishes 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 I 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, Chornssing his unheard despair, a desperate wail : Canght 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 ware Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife Struggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life, — Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon. Priceless second by second, so wastes the afternoon. And it is sunset now ; and another boat and the last Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely passed. IV. Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay Maddenisr against the gate that h locked athwart his way. NUGAKA. 141 " No t we keep the bridge for them that can help him. Ton, Tell ns, who are yon ? " " His brother! " " Grod help yon both I Pass through." Wild, with wide anns of imploring he calls alond to him, Dnto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim j 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 ; Bees aU 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 unkno-wn poet's Bkni, " 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 racident," 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 poiat of interest about the place has Idlled its man, and there might well be a deeper stain oi crimson than it ever wears m that pretty bow over- arehiug the falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy as the lightest- hearted tourist could desire. The abominable sav- ages, revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two 142 THEIE WEDDING JOUENET. hundi-ed years ago ; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily iriving out these squalid deyil-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 throiighout 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-koife, 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-veUed face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect as BasU, in the ramble across GDat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories, — those precious books that make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediasval chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval mar- tyrdom, — and then, lacking this light, turned upon NIAGARA. 148 them tte feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed tbe lurid picture -witli aU 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 aU facts to entertaioing 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 Ufe, 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 aU 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 comer-stone of the new temple there. Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place vis- ited by so many thousands every year. The shrub- bery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should 144 THEIB WEDDING JOUENET. also abound in them ; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of interest and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing arms and their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the island, and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran smooth before breaking into the rap- ids ; and as a soft pastoral feature in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the fore- ground of every famous American landscape ; and when I think of the amount of pubhc love-making in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nine- teenth century is the golden age, and that we want very Httle of being a nation of shepherds and shep- herdesses. Our friends returned by the shore of the Canar dian rapids, having traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now drew slowly neai the Falls again. All parts of the pro- digious pageant have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that constant sub- limity with the sense of discoverers, -or rather oi people whose great fortune it is to see the marvai NIAGARA. 146 in its beginning, and new from tlie creating band. The morning hour lent its svmny 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- Bciousness 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 vrith the larger isl and, and under each of these floujiders a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle vpith 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 whieh 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 herseK with a desperate struggle. The exertion told heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil 10 146 THEIB WEDDING JOTJKNET. another revelation of character. Without tbe ■ij 4^ i^f slightest warnLag she sank down at the root of a tree, Hnd said, with serious composure, that she could NUGABA. 147 never go back on those bridges ; they were not safe He stared at her cowering form ia 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'U have you taken o£E in a boat." " O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat I '" implored Isabel. " You see yourseK 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 hia knees at her side, and took her hands ia 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 aet up a hermitage here, and have your meals sent out from the hotel ? It 's a charming spot, and visited pretty constantly ; but it 'a small, even for a hermi- tage." Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered, that he was not ashamed to make fun of her. He would try kindness. " Perhaps, daxliug, you'll let me carry you ashore." 148 THEIK WEDDING JOTIKNKT. " No, that -will bring double the weight on the bridge at once." " Couldn't you shut your eyes, and let me lead you ? " " Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids," she said, looking up fiercely. " The bridges are not safe. I'm not a child, Basil. 0, what shall we do ? " " I don't know," said Basil, gloonuly. " It 's an esdgency 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, BasU," she replied, with the forbearance o£ those who have reason and justice on their side. The rapids beat and shouted round their little j>rison-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 hia grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to oall 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 affic- 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 kUled by pieces of rock from the precipice overhang- iag the shore below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabei declined to visit the 150 THEIB WEDDING JOUKNEY, Cave of the Winds, to wMch 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 Kke 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 blufEs before. He knew again the awful delight with which so long ago he had watched the changes iu the beauty of the Ca- nadian FaU 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 himseU long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank NUGAEA. 151 bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that he thought the diyersioii an odi* one and rather dangerous. The gentleman took this in good part, and OAvned it might seem so, but added that a distinguished phrenologist had 152 THEIE WEDDING JOURNEY. examiaed Ms head, and told him he had equilib- rium BO large that he could go anywhere. " On your bridal tour, I presume," he continued, as they approached the bench where BasU had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain, middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly ex pressed some inward festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. " "Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara, and wife 's been here once before on the same business. We see a good manj changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with thfe 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. 168 and he 's got to do duty in accounting for my miss- ing glove. It'll never do to teU the girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapiu 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 Baail and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for tha first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a half-barbaric, homicidal gen» tUity of manner fascinating enough in its way, ile 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 hot quite answer to the young lady's description of it, and yet it certainly afforded her a groimd-work. Basil 164 THEIB WEDDING JOUENET. 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 aU 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 Uke 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 Bcll truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triiimphal 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 NU6ABA. 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 feeliag towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! 1 wonder how our colored waiter feels towards hini» 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 's come over the place," he said, as the Southern party, rising from the table, walked out of the diu- ing-room, attended by many treacherous echoes la spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters made. After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whifE 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-Uke 3omposure of J 68 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara grad- ually changes from a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By aU 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 thi-ee massive waUs oi sea rounding and sweeping into the guK together, the color gone, and the smooth briak 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 feU into a revery until he came to an end. It was hard to remem- ber, that sweet summer morning, when the smi shone, and the birds sang, and the music of a pianc and a girl's voice rose from a bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been NIAGARA. IBl planted with caiinon, instead of potatoes and com, and that where the cows came down the farmer'fc 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 ? — gi-ieved 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 chfE on the American side below the Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery mist, " that 'a the Eridal 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 plimge. It 's nothing of the kind ; it 's an honest hydraulic canal, of the most straightfoiTvard character, a poor but respectable mill-race which has devoted itseJf 168 THEIE WEDDINfi JOURNEY. strictly to business, and has turned mill-wheels in- stead of fooling round water-lLlies. It can aifford that ultimate finery. What you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of iudustry." " What I can't help thinking of," said Isabel, who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal Veil, or anything about it, " is the awfulness of stepping off these places in the night-time." She referred to the road which, next the precipice, is un- guarded by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we manage things differ- ently on our continent, and carriages go ruining over the brink from time to time. "Ijf 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 himseK to be very odious, but which he could not disuse. " I'm not afraid," she sighed, " but in the words of the retreating soldier, ' I'm awfully 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. Ha was a colonel or at least a major, and he made a NIAGABA. 159 polite feint of calliag Basil by some military title. He commended the trip they were about to make as tlie 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 breyetted 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 aU reason making bi'm feel for the moment that he was privileged by a document which was no doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in a loud cheerful voice ; he laughed jollily at no appar- ent joke ; he bowed very low and said, " Qood- evening I " at parting, and they went away as if he had blessed them. The rest of the evening they spent in wandering 160 THEIB WEDDING JOUENET. throTigli the village, cliarnied with its bizarre mixi' ore of quaintness and coimnonplaceness ; ia hanging about the shop-windows with their monotonous va- riety of feather fans, — each with a violently red or yeUow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, — moc casons, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouchea, 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-hghts and the persistence of the mosquitoes. There were very few people besides themeelves 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, ?dth a whole yeUow-bird transfixed in the centre. ^Tien he triumphantly displayed it in their room, " Who 's that for, Basil ? " demanded his wife ; " the cook ? " But seeing his ghastly look at this, she foil 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 I Did you think I liked the crue] things, with their dead birds and their hideous colors ? O Basil, dearest ! You are incorrigible. Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature ? Now, my love, just promise me one thing," she said pathetically. " We're 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'U 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'U keep it as a — a — monument." And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud height to which he had cUmbed ia 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 worCt men ase 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 162 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. against tlie half-ironical petting with which she soothed his mortification. But all troubles passed with the night, and the uest morning they spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat Island, Bomewhat 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 feen 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 surface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from this NIAGARA. 168 Bcene of secret power, so different fi'cm 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 rivei 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 clifl oppoBite, it looks a terribly frail structure of pine 164 THEIR WEDDING 70UBNEY. sticks, but is doubtless stronger than it looks ; and at any rate, as it baa 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 bis ladies again, who got iato the movable chamber with them, and they all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind, either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the struc- ture, where it was dark- ened by a rough weather- boarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of the elevator. An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingled in Isabel's heart with a doubt of the value NIAGARA. 165 of the scene below, and she could not look foi-ward 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 expei-ienced 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 inexpressilJy lonely and dreadful, and one feels like an alien presence there, or as if ho had 166 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. Intruded upon some mood or haunt of Nature in which she had a right to be forever alone. The slight, impudent structure of the elevator rises through the solitude, like a thing that merits ruin, yet it is better than something more elaborate, for it looks temporary, and since there must be an ele- vator, it is well to have it of the most 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 beiag 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. " WeU," observed Basil, " I suppose we're intro- Jaced now. We shaU be meeting them from time to time throughout our journey. You know how the same faces and the same trunks used to keep turning up in our travels on the other side. Once meet people in travelling, and you can't get rifj Af them." NUGASA. 161 *' Yes," said Isabel, as if continuing his ti-ain oi thought, " I'm glad we're going to-day." " O dearest ! " " Truly. When we first arrived I felt only the loveliness of the place. It seemed more familiar, too, then ; but ever since, it 's been growing stranger and dreadfuller. Somehow it 's begun to pervade me and possess me in a very uncomfortable way ; I'm tossed upon rapids, and flung from cat- aract brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools ; I'm no longer yours, Basil ; I'm most unhappily married to Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my awful lord ! " She lightly burlesqued the woes of a prima donna, with clasped hands and uplifted eyes. " That'll do very well," Basil commented, " and it implies a reality that can't be quite definitely spoken. We come to Niagara in the patronizing spirit in which we approach everything nowadays, and for a few hours we have it our own way, and pay our little tributes of admiration with as much complacency as we feel in acknowledging the exist- ence of the Supreme Being. But after a while we are aware of some potent influence undermining our self-satisfaction; we begin to conjecture that the great cataract does not exist by virtue of our ap- proval, and to feel that it will not cease when w e ^o away. The second day makes us its abject slaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in terror. I believe some people st.ay for weeks, how- 168 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. ever, and hordes of them have written odes to Niag- ara." " I can't understand it, at all," said Isabel. " I don't wonder now that the town should be so empty this season, but that it should ever be full. I wish we'd gone after our first look at the Falls from the suspension bridge. How beautiful that was 1 I rejoice in everything that I haven't done. I'm so glad I haven't been in the Cave of the Winds ; I'm so happy that Table Rock fell twenty years ago I Basil, I couldn't stand another rainbow to- day. I'm sorry we went out on the Three "Weird Sisters. 0, 1 shall dream about it I and the rush, and the whirl, and the dampness in one's face, and the everlasting chir-r-r-r-r of everything ! " She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a mo- ment's oblivion, and then rose radiant with a ques- tion : " Why in the world, if Niagara is really what it seems to us now, do so many bridal parties come here ? " " Perhaps they're the only people who've the strength to bear up against it, and are not easily dispersed and subjected by it." " But we're dispersed and subjected." " Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who knows how it would be if you were nineteen instead of twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turned of thirty ? " " Basil, you're very cruel." "No, no. But don't you see how it is ? We'v« NUGABA. 169 known too much of life to desire any gloomy oack- ground for our happiness. We're quite contented to have things gay and bright about us. Once we couldn't have made the circle dark enough. Well, my dear, that 's the effect of age. We're Buperan- nuated." " I used to think J was before we were married," answered Isabel simply ; " but now," she added triumphantly, " I'm rescued from all that. I shall never be old again, dearest ; never, as long as you — love me ! " They were about to enter the village, and he could not make any open acknowledgment of her tenderness ; but her silken mantle (or whatever) slipped from her shoulder, and he embracingly re- placed it, flattering himseK that he had deUcately seized this chance of an unavowed caress and not knowing (O such is the blindness of our sex !) that the opportunity had been yet more subtly afforded him, with the art which women never disuse in this world, and which I hope they will not forget in the next. They had an early dinner, and looked their last upon the nuptial gayety of the otherwise forlorn hotel. Three brides sat down with them in travel- ling-dress ; two occupied the parlor as they passed out ; half a dozen happy pairs arrived (to the music of the band) in tte omnibus that was to carry our friends back to the station ; they caught Bight of several about the shop windows, as they 170 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. drove through the streets. Thus the place perpet- ually renews itself in the glow of love as long as the summer lasts. The moon which is elsewhere so often of wormwood, or of the ordiaary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from the first of June to the last of October ; and this is a great charm in Niagara. I think with tender- aess of aU. the lives that have opened so fairly there ; the hopes that have reigned in the glad young hearts ; the measureless tide of joy that ebbs and flows with the arriving and departing trains. Elsewhere there are carking cares of busiaess and of fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heart- break : but here only youth, faith, rapture. I kisa my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I were a poet for a quarter of an hour. Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood to- wards the weak sisterhood of evident brides, and both our friends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara at the last moment. I do not know how much of their content was due to the fact that they had Buffered no sort of wrong there, from those who are apt to prey upon travellers. In the hotel a placard warned them to have nothing to do with the mis- creant hackmen on the streets, but always to order their carriage at the office ; on the street the hack- men whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant drivers in league with the landlords ; yet their actual experience was great reasonableness and facile contentment with the sum agreed upon. NIAGAEA. 171 This may haYe been because the hackmen so far outnumbered the Arisitors, that the latter could dic- tate terms ; but they chose to believe it a triumph of civilization ; and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their faith. Only at the station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt, by the hotel porter who professed to find Basil's trunk enfeebled by travel, and advised a strap for it, which a friend of his would sell for a dollar and a half. Yet even he may have been a benevolent nature unjustlT ■ufipected. VII. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte, the port of Rochester, and they rattled un- eventfully down from Niagara by rail. At the broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad station ; and while Isabel dis- posed of herself on board, Basil looked to the trans- fer of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business by the respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for the boat. He was slow, and his system was not good, — he did not give checks for the pieces, but marked them with the name of their destination ; and there was that' indefinable something in his manner which hinted his hope that you would remember the porter ; but he was so civil that he did not snub the meekest and most vexatious of the passengers, and Baai] DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 173 mutely blessed his servile soul. Few whibe Amer- icans, he said to himself, would behave so decently Ln his place ; and he could not conceive of the American steamboat clerk who would use the politeness towards a waiting crowd that the Cana- dian purser showed when they all wedged them- selves in about his window to receive their state- room keys. He was somewhat awkward, like the porter, but he was patient, and he did not lose hia temper even when some of the crowd, finding he would not bully them, made bold to bully him. He was three times as long in serving them as an American would have been, but their time was of no value there, and he served them well. Basil made a point of speaking him fair, when his turn came, and the purser did not trample on him for a base truckler, as an American jack-in-office would have done. Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer, which was very comfortable, and in every way suf- ficient for its purpose, with a visible captain, who answered two or three questions very pleasantly, and bore himself towards his passengers in some Bort like a host. In the saloon Isabel had found among the paa- Bengers her semi-acquaintances of the hotel parlor and the Rapids-elevator, and had glanced tenta- tively towards them. Whereupon the matron of the party had made advances that ended in their all sitting down together and wondering when the 174 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. boat would start, and what time they would get to Montreal next eyening, with other matters that strangers going upon the same journey may prop- erly marvel over in company. The introduction having thus accomplished itself, they exchanged ad- dresses, and it appeared that Richard was Colonel EUison, of Milwaukee, and that Fanny was his wife. Miss Kitty Ellison was of Western New York, not far from Erie. There was a diversion presently towards the different state-rooms ; but the new acquaiatances sat vis-d-vis at the table, and after supper the ladies drew their chairs to- gether on the promenade deck, and enjoyed the fresh eyening breeze. The sun set magnificent upon the low western shore which they had now left an hour away, and a broad stripe of color stretched behind the steamer. A few thin, lumi- nous clouds darkened momently along the horizon, and then mixed with the land. The stars came out in a clear sky, and a light wind softly buffeted the cheeks, and breathed life into nerves that the day's heat had wasted. It scarcely wrinkled the tran- quil expanse of the lake, on which loomed, far or near, a full-sailed schooner, and, presently melted into the twilight, and left the steamer solitary upon the waters. The company was small, and not re- maikable enough in any way to take the thoughts of any one off his own comfort. A deep sense of the coziness o^ the situation possessed them all which was if possible intensified by the spectacle DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 175 of the captain, seated on the upper deck, and smok- ing a cigar that flashed and fainted like a station- ary fixe-fly in the gathering dusk. How very distant, in this mood, were the most recent events ! Niagara seemed a fable of antiquity ; the ride from Rochester a myth of the Middle Ages. In this ■jool, happy world of quiet lake, of starry skies, of air that the soul itself seemed to breathe, there was Buch consciousness of repose as if one were steeped in rest and soaked through and through with calm. The points of likeness between Isabel and Mrs. Ellison shortly made them mutually uninteresting, and, leaving her husband to the others, Isabel frankly sought the companionship of Miss Kitty, in whom she found a charm of manner which puzzled at first, but which she presently fancied must be perfect trust of others mingUng with a peculiar seK-reliance. " Can't you see, Basil, what a very flattering way it is ? " she asked of her husband, when, after parting with their friends for the night, she tried to explain the character to him. " Of course no art could equal such a natural gift ; for that kind of belief in your good-nature and sympathy makes you feel worthy of it, don't you know ; and so you can't help being good-natured and sympathetic. This Miss Ellison, why, I can tell you, I shouldn't be ashamed of her anywhere.' By anywhere Isa- bel meant Boston, and she went on to praise the foung lady's inteliigence and reflnement, with 176 THEIE WEDDING JOUENEY. those exprossions of surprise at the existencfc ol ciyilization in a -westerner which westerners find it BO hard to receive graciously. Happily, Miss EUi- Bon had not to hear them. " The reason she hap- pened to come with only two dresses is, she lives so near Niagara that she could come for one day, and go back the next. The colonel 's her cousin, and he and his wife go East every year, and they asked her this time to see Niagara with them. She told me all over again what we eavesdropped so shamefully ia the hotel parlor ; and I don't know whether she was better pleased with the prospect of what 's before her, or with the notion of making the journey ia this original way. She didn't force her confidence upon me, any more than she tried to withhold it. We got to talking in the most natural manner ; and she seemed ta tell these things about herself because they amused her and she hked me. I had been saying how my trunk got left behind once on the French side of Mont Cenis, and I had to wear aunt's things at Turin till it could be sent for." " Well, I don't see but Miss Ellison could de- scribe you to her friendg very much as you've described her to me," said Basil. " How did these mutual confidences begin ? Whose trustfulness first flattered the other's ? What else did you tell about yourself ? " " I said we were on our wedding journey,' gfuiltily admitted Isabel. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 177 " O, you did I " " Why, dearest ! I wanted to know, for onoe, jroo see, whether we seemed honeymoon-struck." " And do we ? " " No," came the answer, somewhat ruefully. " Perhaps, Basil," she added, " we've been a little too successful ia disguising our bridal character. Do you know," she continued, looking him anx- iously ia the face, "this Miss Ellison took me at first for — your sister ! " Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter. " One more such victory," he said, " and we are undone ; " and he laughed again immoderately. " How sad is the fruition of human wishes ! There 's nothing, after all, like a good thorough failure for making people happy." Isabel did not listen to him. Safe in a dim corner of the deserted saloon, she seized him in a vindictive embrace ; then, as if it had been he who suggested the idea. of such a loathsome relation, hissed out the hated words, " Your sister ! " and released him with a disdainful repulse. A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at the Canadian city of Kingston, a handsome place, substantial to the water's edge, and giving a sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built. There was an accession of many passengers here, and they and the people on the wharf were as little like Americans as possible. They were English or Irish or Scotch, with th« u 178 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNET. healthful bloom of the Old World still upon theif faces, or if Canadians they looked not leas hearty : so that one must wonder if the line between the Do- minion and the United States did not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. ' These pro- vincials had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn sensibility of expression ; but neither had they our complexions of adobe; and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole, better dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been in a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores who were putting the freight aboard were men of leisure ; they joked ia a kindly way with the orange- women and the old women picking up chips on the pier ; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyond the lake. Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years ago ; of Count Fron- tenac's splendid advent among the Indians ; of the brave La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone ; of wars with the savages and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their allies harried from this point; of the destruction of La SaUe's fort in the Old French War ; and of final surrender a few years later to the English. It is aa picturesque as it is historical. AU about the city the shores are beautifully wooded, and there are many lovely islands, — the first indeed of those Thousand Islands with which the head of the St. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 1T9 Lawrence is filled, and among which the stoamOT was presently threading her way. They are still as charming and still almost as wild as when, ia 1673, Frontenac's flotiUa of canoes passed through their labyrinth and issued upon the lake. Save for a light-house upon one of them, there is almost noth- ing to show that the foot of man has ever pressed the thin grass clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its green in the eternal shadow of their pines and cedars. In the warm morning light they gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel, which some of them almost touched with the plum- age of their evergreens ; and vhere none of them were large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling and separatmg in her TOurse. It is curiously affecting to find them so un- claimed yet from the sohtude of the vanished wil- derness, and scarcely touched even by tradition. But for the interest left them h\ the French, these 180 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed for their beauty alone. There is indeed about them a faint Ught of legend concern- ing the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for seyeral patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their lovely multitude ; but this episode of modem his- tory is difficult for the imagination to manage, and somehow one does not take sentimentally even to that daughter of a lurking patriot, who long baffled her father's pursuers by rowing him from one island to another, and supplying him with food by night. Either the reluctance is from the natural desire that so recent a heroine should be founded on fact, or it is mere perverseness. Perhaps I ought to say, in justice to her, that it was one of her own sex who refused to be interested in her, and forbade Basil to care for her. When he had read of her exploit from the guide-book, Isabel asked him if he had noticed that handsome girl in the blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat, who had come aboard at Kingston. She pointed her out, and courageously made him admire her beauty, which was of the most bewitching Canadian type. The young girl was redeemed by her New World birth from the English heaviness ; a more delicate bloom lighted her cheeks ; a softer grace dwelt in her movement ; yet she was round and full, and she was in the perfect flower of youth. She was not so ethereal in her loveliness as an American girl, but she was not so nervous and had none oi DOWK THE ST. LAWRENCE. 181 the painful fragility of the latter. Her expression was just a little vacant, it must be owned ; but so far as she went she was faultless. She looked like the most tractable of daughters, and as ii she would be the most obedient of wives. She had a blame- less taste in dress, Isabel declared ; her costume of blue and white striped Ganbaldi and Swiss bat 182 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. (set upon heavy masses of dark bro-wn hair) being completed by a black silk skirt. " And you can Bee," she added, " that it 's an old skirt made over, and that she 's dressed as cheaply as she is pret- tily." This surprised BasU, who had imputed tho young lady's personal sumptuousness to her dress, and had thought it enormously rich. When she got off with her chaperone at one of the poorest- looking country landings, she left them in hopeless conjecture about her. Was she visiting there, or was the iuterior of Canada full of such stylish and exquisite creatures ? Where did she get her taste, her fashions, her manners ? As she passed from sight towards the shadow of the woods, they felt the poorer for her going ; yet they were glad to have seen her, and on second thoughts they felt that they could not justly ask more of her than to have merely existed for a few hours in their pres- ence. They perceived that beauty was not only its own excuse for being, but that it flattered and favored and profited the world by consenting to be. At Prescott, the boat on which they had come from Charlotte, and on which they had been prom- ised a passage without change to Montreal, stopped, and they were transferred to a smaller steamer with the uncomfortable name of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirm and dirty, and in every way bore out the character of a squalid Irish goblin. Besides, she was already heavily laden with passengers, and, with the addition of the DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 183 other steamer's people had now double her comple- ment ; and our friends doubted if they were not to pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort. Their fellow-passengers were in great variety, how- ever, and thus partly atoned for their numbers. Among them of course there was a full force cf brides from Niagara and elsewhere, and some curi- ous forms of the prevaihng infatuation appeared. It is well enough, if she hkes, and it may even be very noble for a passably good-looking young lady to marry a gentleman of venerable age ; but to intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively ca- ressing his wrinkled front seems too reproachful of the general pubhc ; while, on the other hand, if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlists in behalf of the white-haired husband the unwilling isympathies of the spectator to see her the centre of a group of young people, and him only acknowl- edged from time to time by a Parthian snub. Nothing, however, could have been more satisfac- tory than the sisterly surrounding of this latter bride. They were of a better class of Irish people ; and if it had been any sacrifice for her to marry so old a man, they were doing their best to give the affair at least the hveliness of a wake, There were five or six of those great handsome girls, with their generous curves and wholesome colors, and they were every one attended by a good-looking colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly brogued voices, and laughed with careless Celtic 184 THEIR WEDDING JOUKNET. laughter. One of the young fellows presently lost his hat overboard, and had to wear the handker- chief of his lady about his head ; and this appeared to be really one of the best things in the world, and led to endless banter. They were well dressed, and it could be imagined that the ancient bride- groom had come in for the support of the whole good-looking, healthy, light-hearted family. In some degree he looked it, and wore but a rueful countenance for a bridegroom ; so that a very young newly married couple, who sat next the joUy sister- and-loverhood could not keep their pitying eyes off his downcast face, " What if he, too, were young at heart I " the kind little wife's regard seemed to say. For the sake of the sKght air that was stirring, and to have the best view of the Rapids, the Ban- shee's whole company was gathered upon the for- ward promenade, and the throng was almost as dense as in a six-o'clock horse-car out from Boston. The standing and sitting groups were closely packed together, and the expanded parasols and umbrellas formed a nearly unbroken roof. Under this Isabel chatted at interyals with the Ellisons, who sat near ; but it was not an atmosphere that provoked social teeling, and she was secretly glad when after a while they shifted their position. It was deadly hot, and most of the people sad- dened and silenced in the heat. From time to time the clouds idling about overhead met and sprinkled DOWK THE ST. LAWRENCE. 18R down a cruel little shower of rain that seemed to make tlie air less breathable than before. The lonely shores were yellow with drought ; the islanda grew wilder and barrener ; the course of the river was for miles at a stretch through country which gave no signs of human life. The St. Lawrence has none of the bold picturesqueness of the Hudson, and is far more like its far-ofE oousiu the Mississippi. Its banks are low like the Mississippi's, its current swift, its way through solitary lands. The same sentiment of early adventure hangs about each : both are haunted by visions of the Jesuit ia his priestly robe, and the soldier ia his mediaeval steel ; the same gay, devout, and dauntless race has touched them both with immortal romance. If the water were of a dusky golden color, instead of translucent green, and the shores and islands were covered with cottonwoods and willows instead of dark cedars, one could with no great effort believe one's self on the Mississippi between Cairo and St. Louis, so much do the great rivers strike one as kindred in the chief features of their landscape. Only, in tracing this resemblance you do not know just what to do with the purple mountains of Ver- mont, seen vague against the horizon from the St. Lawrence, or with the quaint little French viUagea that begin to show themselves as you penetrate far- ther down into Lower Canada. These look so peaceful, with their dormer-windowed cottages clus- tering about their church-spires, that it seems im- 186 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. possible they could once have been the homes of the savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand and scalping-knife and tomahawk, harassed the borders of New England for a hundred years. But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St. Regis, in which was kindled the torch that wrapt Deerfield in flames, waking her people from their sleep to meet instant death or taste the bitterness of a captivity. The bell which was sent out from France for the Indian converts of the Jesuits, and was captured by an English ship and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it called the Puritans to prayer, tiU at last it also summoned the priest-led Indians and habitans across hundreds of miles of winter and of wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration, — this fateful bell still hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and vespers for nearly two centuries the children of those who fought so pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it. Our friends would fain have heard it as they passed, hoping for some mournful note of history in its sound; but it hung silent over the silent hamlet, which, as it lay in the hot afternoon sun by the river's side, seemed as lifeless as the Deerfield burnt long ago. They turned from it to look at a gentleman who had just appeared in a mustard-colored linen duster, and Basil asked, " Shouldn't you like to know the origiu, personal history, and secret feelings of a DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 187 gentleman who goes about in a duster of that par- ticular tiut ? Or, that gentleman yonder with his eye tied up in a wet handkerchief, do you suppose he 's travelling for pleasure ? Look at those young people from Omaha : they haven't ceased flirting or cackling since we left Kingston. Do you think everybody has such spirits out at Omaha ? But behold a yet more surprising figure than any we have yet seen among this boat-load of nonde- scripts ! " This was a tall, handsome young man, with a face of somewhat foreign cast, and well dressed, with a certain impressive difference from the rest Ln the cut of his clothes. But what most drew the eye to him was a large cross, set with brilliants, and surmounted by a heavy double-headed eagle iu gold. This ornament dazzled from a conspicuous place on the left lappel of his coat ; on his hand shone a magnificent diamond ring, and he bore a stately opera-glass, with which, from time to time, he imperiously, as one may say, surveyed the land- scape. As the imposing apparition grew upon Isa- bel, " O here," she thought, " is something truly distinguished. Of course, dear," she added aloud to Basil, " he 's some foreign nobleman travelling here " ; and she ran over in her mind the newspa- per announcements of patrician visitors from abroad and tried to identify him with some one of them. The cross must be the decoration of a foreign order, and Basil suggested that he was perhaps a member 188 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. of some legation at WasMngton, who had mn up there for his summer vacation. The cross puzzled him, but the double-headed eagle, he said, meant either Austria or Russia ; probably Austria, for the wearer looked a trifle too civilized for a Russian. " Yes, indeed I What an 'air he has. Never tell me. Basil, that there 's nothing in Hood ! " cried Isabel, who was a bitter aristocrat at heart, like all her sex, though in priaciple she was democratic enough. As she spoke, the object of her regard looked about him on the different groups, not with pride, not with hauteur, but with a glance of uncon- scious, unmistakable superiority. " O, that stare 1 " she added ; nothing but high birth and long descent can give it ! Dearest, he 's becoming a great afflic- tion to me. I want to know who he is. Couldn't you invent some pretext for speaking to him ? " " No, I couldn't do it decently ; and no doubt he'd snub me as I deserved if I intruded upon him. Let 's wait for fortune to reveal him." " Well, I suppose I must, but it 's dreadful ; it '8 reaUy dreadful. You can easily see that 's distinc- tion," she continued, as her hero moved about the promenade and gently but loftily made a way for himaelf among the other passengers and favored the scenery through his opera-glass from one point and another. He spoke to no one, and she reason- ably supposed that he did not know English. In the mean time it was drawing near the houi of dinner, but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one, DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 189 two came ani went, and then at last came the din- ner, which had been delayed, it seemed, till the cook could rearuit his energies sufficiently to meet the wants of double the number he had expected to provide for. It was observable of the officers and crew of the Banshee, that while they did not hold themselves aloof from the passengers in tlie dis- dainful American manner, they were of feeble mind, and not only did everything very slowly (in the usual Canadian fashion), but with an ineffi- ciency that among us would have justified them in being insolent. The people sat down at several successive tables to the worst dinner that ever vras cooked ; the ladies first, and the gentlemen after- wards, as they made conquest of places. At the second table, to Basil's great satisfaction, he found a seat, and on his right hand the distinguished for- eigner. " Naturally, I was somewhat abashed," he said in the account he was presently called to give Isa- bel of the iuterview, "but I remembered that I was an American citizen, and tried to maintain a decent composure. For several minutes we sat silent behind a dish of flabby cucumbers, expecting the dinner, and I was wondering whether I should address him in French or German, — for I knew you'd never forgive me if I let slip such a chance, — when he turned and spoke himself." " O what did he say, dearest ? " " He said, ' Pretty tejious waitin,' ain't it ? in the best Ne-sv York State accent." 190 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY. " You don't mean it ! " gasped Isabel. " But I do. After that I took courage to ask what his cross and double-headed eagle meant. He showed the condescension of a true not)leman. ' O,' says he, ' I 'm glad you like it, and it 's not the least offense to ask,' and he told me. Can you imagine what it is ? It 's the emblem of the fifty-fourth degree in the secret society he belongs to!" " I don't believe it ! " " Well, ask him yourself, then," returned Basil ; " he 's a very good fellow. ' O, that stare ! noth- ing but high birth and long descent could give it ! ' " he repeated, abominably implying that he had himself had no share in their common error. What retort Isabel might have made cannot now be known, for she was arrested at this moment by a rumor amongst the passengers that they were coming to the Long Sault Rapids. Looking for- ward she saw the tossing and flashing of surges that, to the eye, are certainly as threatening as the rapids above Niagara. The steamer had already passed the Deplau and the Galopes, and they had thus had a foretaste of whatever pleasure or terror there is ia the descent of these nine miles of stormy sea. It is purely a matter of taste, about shooting the rapids of the St. Lawrence. The passengers like it better than the captain and the pilot, to guess by their looks, and the women and children like it better than the men. It is no doubt verj DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 191 flmlling and picturesque and wildly beautiful : the ohildren crow and laugh, the women shout forth their dehght, as the boat enters the seething cur- rent ; great foaming waves strike her bows, and brawl away to the stem, while she dips, and roUs, and shoots onward, light as a bird blown by the wind ; the wild shores and islands whirl out of sight ; you feel in every fibre the career of the vessel. But the captain sits in front of the pilot- house smoking with a grave face, the pUots tug hard at the wheel ; the hoarse roar of the waters fills the air ; beneath the smoother sweeps of the current you can see the brown rocks ; as you sink from ledge to ledge in the writhing and twisting steamer, you have a vague sense that all this is perhaps an achievement rather than an enjoyment When, descending the Long Sault, you look back up hill, and behold those billows leaping down the steep slope after you, " No doubt," you confide to your soul, "it is magnificent ; but it is not pleas- ure." You greet with silent satisfaction the level river, stretching between the Long Sault and the Coteau, and you admire the dehghtful tranquillity of that beautiful Lake St. Francis into which it expands. Then the boat shudders into the Coteau Rapids, and down through the Cedars and Cas- cades. On the rocks of the last Kes the skeleton of a steamer wrecked upon fchem, and gnawea at gtill by the white-tusked wolfish rapids. No one, they say, was lost from her. " But how," Basil 192 THEIB WEDDING JOUENEY. thought, " -would it fare with all these people packed here upon her bow, if the Banshee should swing round upon a ledge ? " As to Isabel, she looked upon the wrecked steamer with indifference, as did all the women ; but then they could not swim, and would not have to save themselves. " The La Chine 's to come yet," they exulted, " and that 's the awfuUest of all ! " They passed the Lake St. Louis ; the La Chine Rapids flashed into sight. The captain rose up from his seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and waved a silence with it. " Ladies and gentlemen," said he, " it 's very important in passing these rap- ids to keep the boat perfectly trim. Please to re- main just as you are." It was twilight, for the boat was late. From the Indian village on the shore they signaled to know if he wanted the local pilot ; the captain re- fused ; and then the steamer plunged into the leap- ing waves. From rock to rock she swerved and sank ; on thd last ledge she scraped with a deadly touch that went to the heart. Then the danger was passed, and the noble city of Montreal was in full sight, lying at the foot of her dark green mountain, and lifting her many spires into the rosy twilight air : massive and grand showed the sister towers of the French ca- thedral. Basil had hoped to approach this famous city with just associations. He had meant to conjun DOWN THE ST. LAWKENCE. 19? np for Isabel's sake some reflex, however faint, of that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has painted of Maisonneuve founding and consecrating Montreal. He flushed with the recollection of the historian's phrase ; but in that moment there came forth from the cabin a pretty young person who gave every token of being a pretty young actress, even to the duenna-hke, elderly female companion, to be de- tected in the remote background of every your.g actress. She had flirted audaciously during the day with some young EngUshmen and Canadians of her acquaintance, and after passing the La Chine Rapids she had taken the hearts of aU the men by springing suddenly to her feet, apostrophizing the tumult with a charming attitude, and warbling a delicious bit of song. Now as they drew near the city the Victoria Bridge stretched its long tube athwart the river, and looked so low because of its great length that it seemed to bar the steamer's passage. " I wonder," said one of the actress's adorers, — a Canadian, whose face was exactly that of the beaver on the escutcheon of his native province, and whose heavy gallantries she had constantly re- ceived with a gay, impertinent nonchalance, — "I wonder if we can be going right under that bridge ? " " No, sir ! " answered the pretty young actress with shocking promptness, " we're going right over it: - u 194 THEIR WEDDING JOUENET. " • Three groans and a guggle, And an awful struggle, And over we go ! ' " At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian looked very sheepish — for a beaver ; and all the other people laughed; but the noble historical shades of Basil's thought vanished in wounded dignity beyond recaU, and left him feeling rathei ashamed, — for he had laughed too. vm. THE SBNTCMBNT OF MONTKEAL '^^""' The feel- ing of foreign travel for which oux tou- rists had striv- en throughout their journey, and which they had known in some degree at Kingston and aU. the way down the river, was in- tensified from the first mo- ment in Mon- treal ; and it was so welcome that they were almost glad to lose money on their greenbacks, which the conductor of the onmibus would take only at a discount of twenty cents. At breakfast next morning they 196 THEIE WEDDING JOURNEY. could hardly tell on what country they had fallen. The waiters had but a thin varnish of English speech upon their native French, and they spoke their own tongue with each other ; but most of the meats were cooked to the English taste, and the whole was a poor imitation of an American hotel. During their stay the same comminghng of usages and races bewildered them ; the shops were English and the clerks were commonly French ; the car- riage-drivers were often Irish, and up and down the streets with their pious old-fashioned names, tinkled American horse-cars. Everywhere were churches and convents that recalled the ecclesias- tical and feudal origin of the city ; the great tubu- lar bridge, the superb water-front with its long array of docks only surpassed by those of Liver- pool, the solid blocks of business houses, and the substantial mansions on the quieter streets, pro- claimed the succession of Protestant thrift and eneSrgy. ' Our friends cared far less for the modern splendor of Montreal than for the remnants of its past, and for the features that identified it with another faith and another people than their own. Isabel would almost have confessed to any one of the black-robed priests upon the street ; Basil could easily have gone down upon his knees to the white-hooded, pale-faced nuns gUdiag among the crowd. It waa rapture to take a carriage, and drive, not to the cemetery, not to the public library, not to the THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL, 197 rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association, or tha grain elevators, or the new park just tricked out with rockwork and sprigs of evergreen, — not to any of the charming resorts of our own cities, but aa in Europe to the churches, the churches of a pitiless superstition, the churches with their atrocious pic- tures and statues, their lingering smeU of the morn- ing's iacense, their confessionals, their fee-taking sacristans, their worshippers dropped here and there upon their knees about the aisles and saying their prayers with shut or wanderiag eyes according as they were old women or young ! I do not defend the feeble sentimentality, — call it vnckedness if you Hke, — but I understand it, and I forgive it from my soul. They went first, of course, to the French cathe- dral, pausing on theii way to alight and walk through the Bonsecours Market, where the habitans have all come in their carts, with their various stores of poul- try, fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a study. Here is a simple-faced young peasant- couple with butter and eggs and chickens ravish- ingly displayed ; here is a smooth-cheeked, black- eyed, black-haired young girl, looking as if an in- fusion of Indian blood had darkened the red of her cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions, potatoes, beets, and turnips ; there an old woman with a face carven like a walnut, behind a flattering array ot cherries and pears ; yonder a whole family traffick- ing in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar is 198 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY. many shapes of pious and grotesque device. There are gay shows of bright scarfs and kerchiefs and vari-colored yarns, and sad shows of old clothes and second-hand merchandise of other sorts ; but above all prevails the abundance of orchard and garden, while within the fine edifice are the stalls of the butchers, and iu the basement below a world of household utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware, and wooden-ware. As in other Latin countries, each peasant has given a personal interest to his wares, but the bargains are not clamored over as iu Latin lands abroad. Whatever protest and concession and invocation of the saints attend the transaction of business at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued tone. The fat huckster-women drowsing beside their wares, scarce send their voices beyond the borders of their broad-brimmed straw hats, as they softly haggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip together. At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst paintings in the world, and the massive pine-board pillars are unscrupulously smoked to look like mar- ble ; but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been St. Peter's ; in fact it has something of the bam- like immensity and impressiveness of St. Peter's. They did not ask it to be beautiful or grand ; they desired it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondly cherished hideousness and incongruity of the average Catholic churches of their remem- brance, and it did this and more : it added an effect THE SENTUIENT OF MONTREAL. 19B of its own ; it offered the spectacle of a swartty old Indian kneeling before the high altar, telling hia beads, and saying with many sighs and tears tha prayers which it cost so much martyrdom and he- roism to teach his race. " O, it is only a savage man," said the little French boy who was showing them the place, impatient of their interest in a thing so unworthy as this groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly about from object to object, rapidly lec- turing their inattention. "It is now time to go up into the tower," said he, and they gladly made that toilsome ascent, though it is doubtful if the as- cent of towers is not too much like the ascent of mountains ever to be compensatory. From the top of Notre Dame is certainly to be had a prospect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves and trem- bling muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller might well look with delight, and as it is must be- hold with wonder. So far as the eye reaches it dwells only upon what is magnificent. AU the fea- tures of that landscape are grand. Below you spreads the city, which has less that is merely mean in it than any other city of our continent, and which is everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices, adorned by tasteful churches, and skii-ted by full- foliaged avenues of mansions and villas. Behind it rises the beautiful mountain, green vdth woods and gardens to its crest, and flanked on the east by an endless fertile plain, and on the west by another expanse, through which the Ottawa rushes, turbid 200 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and dark, to its confluence -witli the St. Lawrence. Then these two mighty streams commingled flow past the city, lighting up the vast champaign coun- try to the south, while upon the utmost southern vcige, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summita of far-off mountains. As our travellers gazed upon aU this grandeur, their hearts were humbled to the tacit admission that the colonial metropolis was not only worthy of its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not ex- celled by any of the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic. Long before they quitted Mon- treal they had rallied from this weakness, but they delighted still to honor her superb beauty. The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those who have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel hfe, and the objects of interest thrive upon their bounty. Our friends met them at every turn, and knew them at a glance from the native populations, who are also easily distinguishable from each other. The French Canadians are nearly always of a peasant- like commonness, or where they rise above this have a bourgeois commonness of face and manner , and the English Canadians are to be known fiom tlie many English sojourners by the effort to look much more Enghsh -than the latter. The social heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-coun- try, that is plain, whatever the political tendency THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 201 tnajr be ; and the public monuments ani iuscrip- tions celebrate this affectionate union. At the English cathedral the effect is diepened by the epitaphs of those whose Uves were passed ux the joint service of England and her loyal child ; and our trayellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in *'.hat attitude of proud reverence. Here, at least, was a people not cut off from its past, but holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for as only in history. It gave a glamour of olden time to the new land ; it touched the pronaic demo- cratic present with the waning poetic Ught of the aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was here and there a title on the tablets, and there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the dust. It is a beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic ; if you are so happy, you are rather curtly told you may enter by a burly English figure in some kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet precincts you may feel yourself in England if you like, — which, for my part, I do not. Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits, with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling, its architectu- ral taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black-eyed peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar, just as in the enviably deplorable countries we all love ; nor so much even as the Irish cathedral which 202 THEIR WEDDING JOUENET. they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cath»- dral indeed, painted and gilded d merveille, and everywhere stuck about with big and little saints and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad — but for those in the French cathedral. There is, of course, a series lepresenting Christ's progress to Calvary; and there was a very tattered old man, — an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned in whiskey, and who now spoke in a ghostly whisper, — who, when he saw Basil's eye fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and tediously explained them. " Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and then pay him for it ? " Isabel asked. " O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles of other lands and days, that I couldn't help it," he answered; and straightway in the eyes of both that poor, whiskey^ed, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar. They were always doing something of this kind, those absurdly sentimental people, whom yet I can- not find it in my heart to blame for their' folly, though I could name ever so many reasons for re- buking it. Why, in fact, shoiild we wish to find America like Europe ? Are the ruins and impos- tures and miseries and superstitions which beset the traveller abroad so precious, that he should desire to imagine them at every step in his own hemisphere ? Or have we then of our own no ef- THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 203 fectiYe shapes of igr.orance and want and incredi- bility, that we must forever seek an alien contrast to OTjr nat^'ve intelligence and comfort ? Some such questions this guilty couple put to each other, and then drove o£E to visit the convent of the Gray Nuns with a joyful expectation which I suppose the prospect of the finest public-school exhibition in Boston could never have inspired. But, indeed, since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not weU that there are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleas- ure in their sad, pallid existence ? The convent is at a good distance from the Irish cathedral, and in going to it the tourists made their driver carry them through one of the few old Jb'rench streets which still remain in Montreal. Fires and improvements had made havoc among the quaint houses since Basil's first visit ; but at last they came upon a narrow, ancient Rue Saint Antoine, — or whatever other saint it was called after, — in which there was no English face or house to be seen. The doors of the little one-story dwellings opened from the pavement, and within you saw fat madame the mother moving about her domestic affairs, and spare monsieur the elderly husband smoking beside the open window ; French babies crawled about the tidy floors ; French mar- tyrs (let us believe Lalement or Br^beuf, who gave ap their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada) lifted their eyes in high-colored lithographs on the wall •) among the flawer-pcts in the dormer-window 204 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. looking from every tin roof sat and sewed a smooth- haired young girl, I hope, — the romance of each little mansion. The antique and foreign character of the place was accented by the inscription upon a wall of " Sirop adoucissant de Madame Winslow." Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made g refuge within the ample borders of their convent for infirm old people and for foundling children, and it is now in the regular course of sight-seeing for the traveller to visit their hospital at noonday, when he beholds the Sisters at their devotions in the chapel. It is a bare, white-waHed, cold-look- ing chapel, with the usual paraphernalia of pictures and crucifixes. Seated upon low benches on either side of the aisle were the curious or the devout; the former in greater number and chiefly Ameri- cans, who were now and then whispered silent by an old pauper zealous for the sanctity of the place. At the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by two, followed by the lady-superior with a prayer- book in her hand. She clapped the leaves of this together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to kneel again and rise, while they repeated in rather harsh voices their prayers, and then clattered out of the chapel as they had clattered in, with re- Bounding shoes. The two young girls at the head were very pretty, and all the pale faces had a corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their pen- sive sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest girls might very well be the twain that he had seen THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 205 there so many years ago, stricken forever young in their joyless beauty. The ungraceful go%vns of coarse gray, the blue checked aprons, the black crape caps, were the same ; they came and went with the same quick tread, touching their brows with holy water and kneeling and rising now as then with the same constrained and ordered moTe- ments. Would it be too cruel if they were really the same persons ? or would it be yet more cruel if every year two girls so young and fair were self- doomed to renew the likeness of that youthful death ? The visitors went about the hospital, and saw the old men and the little children to whom these good pure lives were given, and they could only blame the system, not the instruments or their work. Perhaps they did not judge wisely of the amount of self-sacrifice involved, for they judged from hearts to which love was the whole of earth and heaven ; but nevertheless they pitied the Gray Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfort of their con- vent, the unnatural care of those ahen little ones. Poor Soeurs Grises ! in their narrow cells ; at the bedside of sickness and age and sorrow ; kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the bloody spectacle of the cross ! — the power of your Church is shown far more subtly and mightily in such as you, than in her grandest fanes or the sight of her most august ceremonies, Avith praying priests, swinging censers, tapers and pictures and images, 206 THEIR WEDDING JOURNFT. under a gloomy heaTen of cathedral arches. There, indeed, the faithful have given theit substance, but here the nun has given up the most precious part of her woman's nature, and all the tenderness that clings about the thought of wife and mother. " There are some things that always greatly afflict me in the idea of a new country," said Basil, as they loitered slowly through the grounds of the convent toward the gate. " Of course, it 's absurd to think of men as other than men, as having changed their natures with their skies ; but a new land always does seem at first thoughts Kke a new chance afforded the race for goodness and happi- ness, for health and life. So I grieve for the earli- est dead- at Plymouth more than for the multitude that the plague swept away ia London ; I shudder over the crime of the first guilty man, the sin of the first wicked woman in a new country ; the trouble of the first youth or maiden crossed in love there is intolerable. AH should be hope and free- dom and prosperous life upon that virgin soil. It never was so since Eden ; but none the less I feel it ought to be ; and I am oppressed by the thought that among the earliest walls which rose upon this broad meadow of Montreal were those built to im- mure the innocence of such young girls as these and shut them from the life we find so fair. Wouldn't you like to know who was the first that took the veil in this wild new country ? Who was ahe, poor soul, and what was her deep sorrow or THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 207 lofty rapture? You can fancy her some Indian maiden lured to the renunciation by the splendor of symbols and promises seen vaguely through the lingering mists of her native superstitions ; or some weary soul, sick from the vanities and vices, the bloodshed and the tears of the Old World, and eager for a silence profounder than that of the wil- derness into which she had fled. Well, the Church knows and God. She was dust long ago." From time to time there had fallen little fitful showers during the morning. Now as the weddiag- journeyers passed out of the convent gate the rain dropped soft and thin, and the gray clouds that floated through the sky so swiftly were as far-seen Gray Sisters in flight for heaven. " We shall have time for the drive round the mountain before dinner," said Basil, as they got into their carriage again ; and he was giving the order to the driver, when Isabel asked how far it was. " Nine miles." " O, then we can't think of going vrith one horse. You know," she added, " that we always intended to have two horses for going round the mountain." 'No," said Basil, not yet used to having hia decisions reached without his knowledge. " And I don't see why we should. Everybody goes with one. You don't suppose we're too heavy, do you ? " " I had a party from the States, ma'am, yester- 208 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY. day," interposed the driver ; " two ladies, real heavy ones, two gentlemen, weighin' two hundred apiece, and a stout young man on the box with me. You'd 'a' thought the horse was drawin' an empty carriage, the way she darted along." " Then his horss must be perfectly worn out to-day," said Isabel, refusing to admit the poor fellow directly even to the honors of a defeat. Jle had proved too much, and was put out of court with no hope of repairing his error. " Why, it seems a pity," whispered Basil, dis- passionately, " to turn this man adrift, when he had a reasonable hope of being with us all day, and has been so civil and obliging." " yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do ! Why don't you sentimentaHze his helpless, overworked horse ? — all in a reek of perspiration." " Perspiration ! Why, my dear, it 's the rain I " " WeU, rain or shine, darling, I don't want to go round the mountain with one horse ; and it 's very unkind of you to insist now, when you've tacitly promised me all along to take two.'' " Now, this is a little too much, Isabel. You know we never mentioned the matter tiU this moment." " It 's the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn't. But I don't ask you to keep your word. I don't want to go round the mountain. I'd much rather go to the hotel. I'm tired." " Very well, then, Isabel, I'll leave you at th« hotel." THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 209 In a moment it had come, tlie first serioas dispute of their wedded life. It had come as all such calamities come, from nothiag and it was on them 11 210 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. In full disaster ere they knew. Such a very little while ago, there in the convent garden, their Uvea had been drawn closer in sympathy than ever be- fore ; and now that blessed time seemed ages since, and they were further asunder than those who have never been friends. "I thought," bitterly n.used Isabel, " that he would have done anything for me." " Who could have dreamed that a woman of her sense would be so unreasonable," he wondered. Both had tempers, as I know my dearest reader has (if a lady), and neither would yield; and so, presently, they could hardly tell how, for they were aghast at it all, Isabel was alone in her room amidst the ruins of her life, and BasU alone in the one- horse carriage, trying to drive away from the wreck of his happiness. AU was over ; the dream was past ; the charm was broken. The sweetness of their love was turned to gall ; whatever had pleased them in their loving moods was loathsome now, and the things they had praised a moment before were hateful. In that baleful light, which seemed to dwell upon all they ever said or did iu mutual enjoy- ment, how poor and stupid and empty looked their wedding-journey ! Basil spent five minutes in ar- raigning his wife and convicting her of every folly and fault. His soul was in a whirl, — " For to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.' In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidinga he found himself suddenly become her ardent ad- THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 211 rocate, and ready to denounce her judge as a heart- less monster. " On our wedding journey, too '. Good heavens, what an incredible brute I am ! '' Then he said, " What an ass I am ! " And the pathos of the case having yielded to its absurdity, he was helpless. In five minutes more he was at Isabel's side, the one-horse carriage driver dismissed with a handsome pour-boire, and a pair of lusty bays with a glittering barouche waiting at the door below. He swiftly accounted for his presence, which she seemed to find the most natural thing that could be, and she met his surrender with the openness of a heart that forgives but does not forget, if iadeed the most gracious art is the only one unknown to the sex. She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life, amidst which she had heart-brokenly sat down with all her things on. " I knew you'd come back," she said. " So did I," he answered. " I am much too good and noble to sacrifice my preference to my duty." " I didn't care particularly for the two horses, BasU," she said, as they descended to the barouche. " It was your refusing them that hurt me." " And I didn't want the one-horse carriage. It was your insisting so that provoked me." " Do you think people ever quarreled before on a wedding journey ? " asked Isabel as they droTS gayly out of the city. " Never ! I can't conceive of it. I suppose il this were written down, nobody would believe it." 212 THEIR WEDDING JOITKNET. "No, nobody could," said Isabel, musingly , and ahe added after a pause, " I -wisli you would tell me just what you thought of me, dearest. Did you feel as you did when our little afEair waa broken off, long ago ? Did you hate me ? " " I did, most cordially ; but not half so much as I despised myself the next moment. As to its being like a lover's quarrel, it wasn't. It was more bitter ; so much more love than lovers ever give had to be taken back. Besides, it had no dignity, and a lover's quarrel always has. A lover's quar- rel always springs from a more serious cause, and has an air of romantic tragedy. This had no grace of the kind. It was a poor shabby little squabble." " O, don't call it so, Basil ! I should like you to respect even a quarrel of ours more than that. It was tragical enough with me, for I didn't see how it could ever be made up. I knew I couldn't make the advances. I don't think it is quite feminine to be the first to forgive, is it ? " " I'm sure I can't say. Perhaps it would be rather unladylike." " Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get at is this : whethei we shall love each other the more or the less for it, I think we shall get on all the better for a while, on account of it. But I should have said it was totally out of character. It 's something you might have expected of a verj young bridal couple ; but after what we've beer through, it seems too improbable." THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 218 " Very -well," said Basil, who, having made all the (wncessions, could not enjoy the quarrel as she did, simply because it was theirs ; " let 's behave aa if it had never been." " O no, we can't. To me, it 's as if we had just won each other." In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness to that ride round the mountain, and shed a beneficent glow upon the rest of their journey. The sun came out through the thin clouds, and hghted up the vast plain that swept away north and east, with the purple heights against the eastern sky. The royal mountain lifted its graceful mass beside them, and hid the city wholly from sight. Peasant-villages, in the shade of beautiful elms, dotted the plain in every direction, and at intervals crept up to the side of the road along which they drove. But these had been corrupted by a more ambitious architecture since BasH saw them last, and were no longer purely French in appearance. Then, nearly every house was a tannery in a modest way, and poetically published the fact by the display of a sheep's tail over the front door, like a bush at a wine-shop. Now, if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the she^ps' tails had vanished from the portals. But our friends were consoled by meeting numbers of the peasants jolting home from market ia the painted carts, which are doubtless of the pattern of the darts first built there two hundred years ago. They were grateful for the immortal old women, crooked 214 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded in these vehicles ; when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart, and showed the thick, clumfly ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could only aigh out their unspeakable satisfaction. Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cot- tages, through the open doors of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One of the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture the school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaiat cap on her gray head, and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls. By and by it began to rain agaia; and now while their driver stopped to put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend with silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft whisper of the shower without. There was no one there but themselves. The urn of holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and no penitent knelt at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one lighted lamp. The white roof swelled into dim arches over their heads ; the pale day like a visible hush stole through the painted windows ; they beard themselves breathe as they crept from picture tc picture. A narrow door opened at the aide of the high altar, and a slender young priest appeared in » long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 216 06 he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence ; and when he approached with dieamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed coui'teoubly, it seemed impossible he should speak. But he spoke, the pale young priest, the dark-robed tra dition, the tonsured vision of an age and a church that are passing. " Do you un- derstand French, monsieur ? " " A. very little, monsieur." " A very little is more than my Enghsh," he said, yet he politely went the roimd of the pictures with them, and gave them the names of the painters be- tween his cross- mgs at the differ- ent altars. At the high altar there was a very fair Crucifixion ; be- fore this the priest bent one knee. " Fine picture, fine altar, fine church," he said in English. At last they stopped near che poor-box. As their 216 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. coius clinked against those mthin, he smiled se- renely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed, and, as if he had relapsed Lato the past, he van- ished through the narrow door by which he had entered. Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on the church steps. Then she cried, — " O, why didn't something happen ? " " Ah, my dear I what could have been half so good as the nothing that did happen ? Suppose we knew him to have taken orders because of a dis- appointment in love: how common it would have made him ; everybody has been crossed in love once or twice." He bade the driver take them back to the hotel. " This is the very bouquet of adventure : why should we care for the grosser body ? I dare say if we knew all about yonder pale young priest, we should not think him half so interesting as we do now." At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses In guessiQg the nationality of the different persons, and in wondering if the Canadians did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry, and in rotundity of person and freshness of face, just as they emulated them in the cut of their clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their health upon the health of the mother-country ? Our friends began to detect something servile in it all, and but that they were such amiable persons, THK SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 217 the loyally perfect digestion of Montreal would hav« gone far to impair their own. The loyalty, which had already appeared to them in the cathedral, suggested itself in many ways upon the street, when they went out after dinner to do that little shopping which Isabel had planned to do in Montreal. The bookseller' win- dows were full of Canadian editions of our authors, and English copies of English works, instead of our pirated editions ; the dry -goods stores were gay with fabrics in the London taste and garments of the London shape ; here was the sign of a photog- rapher to the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales; a barber was "under the patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E. the Duke of Cambridge, and the gentry of Mon- treal." loh dien was the motto of a restaurateur ; a hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade with Moni soit qui mal y pense. Again they noted the English solidity of the civic edifices, and already they had observed in the foreign population a dif- ference from that at home. They saw no German faces on the streets, and the Irish faces had not that truculence which they wear sometimes with ua. They had not lost their native simpleness and kind- liness ; the Irishmen who drove the public carriages were as civil as our own Boston hackmen, and be- haved as respectfully under the shadow of England liere, as they would have done under it in Ireland. The problem which vexes ns seems to have been 218 THEIK WEDDING JOURNEY. solved pleasantly enough in Canada. Is it becaam the Celt cannot brook equality ; and where he has not an established and recognized caste above him, longs to trample on those about him ; and if he can- not be lowest, will at least be highest ? However, our friends did not sufEer this or any other advantage of the colonial relation to divert them from the opinion to which their observation was gradually bringing them, — that its overween- ing loyalty placed a great country like Canada in a very siUy attitude, the attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, clinging to the maternal skirts, and though spoilt and willful, without any character of his own. The constant reference of local hopes to that remote centre beyond seas, the test of suc- cess by the criterions of a necessarily different civil- ization, the social and intellectual dependence im- plied by traits that meet the most hurried glance in the Dominion, give an effect of meanness to the whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacka the grandeur which no sum of material prosperity can give ; it is ignoble, like all voluntarily subor- dinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis in the New World, and that till it is shaken loose from England it cannot have. It would be a pity, however, if it should be parted from the parent country merely to be joined to an unsympathetic half-brother like ourselves uid nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 219 the Canadian mind. There are some experiments no longer possible to us which could still be tried there to the advantage of civilization, and we were better two great nations side by side than a union of discordant traditions and ideas. But none the less does the American traveller, swelling with for- getfulness of the shabby despots who govern New york, and the svsindling railroad kings whose word is law to the whole land, feel like saying to the hulking young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the Lakes, " Sever the apron-strings of allegiance, and try to be yourself whatever you are." Something of this sort Basil said, though of course not m apostrophic phrase, nor with Isabel's entire concurrence, when he explained to her that H was to ttie colonial dependence of Canada she owed the ability to buy things so cheaply there. The fact is that the ladies' parlor at the hotel had been after dinner no better than a den of smug- glers, in which the fair contrabandists had debated the best means of evading the laws of their country. At heart every man is a smuggler, and how much more every woman ! She would have no scruple in ruining the silk and woolen interest throughout the United States. She is a free-trader by intuitive perception of right, and is Hmited in practice by nothing but fear of the statute. What could be taken into the States without detection, was the subject before that wicked conclave; and next, what it would pay to buy in Canada. It seemed 220 IHEIK WEDDING JOURNEY, that silk umbrellas were most eligible wares ; and in the display of such purchases the parlor waa given the appearance of a violent thunder-storm. Gloves it was not advisable to get ; they were bet- ter at home, as were many kinds of fine woolen goods. But laces, which you could carry about yoo, were excellent ; and so was any kind of silk. Could it be carried if simply cut, and not made up ? There was a diEEerence about this : the friend of one lady had taken home haK a trunkful of cut silks ; the friend of another had " run up the breadths " of one lone little silk skirt, and then lost it by the rapacity of the customs officers. It was pretty much luck, and whether the officers happened to be in good- humor or not. You must not try to take in any- thing out of season, however. One had heard of a Boston lady going home in July, who " had the furs taken off her back," in that inclement month. Beat get everything seasonable, and put it on at once. " And then, you know, if they ask you, you can say it 's been worn." To this black wisdom came the combined knowledge of those miscreants. Basil could not repress a shudder at the imiate depravity of the female heart. Here were virgins nurtured in the most spotless purity of life, here were virtuous mothers of families, here were venerable matrons, patterns in society and the church, — smugglers to a woman, and eager for any guilty subterfuge 1 He glanced at Isabel to see what effect the evil conver- sation had upon her. Her eyes sparkled; .hei THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 221 oheeka glowed j all the woman was on fire for smuggling. He sighed heavily and went out with her to do the little shopping. Shall I follow them upon their excursion ' Shopping in Montreal is very much what it is in Boston or New York, I imagine, except that the clerks have a more honeyed sweetness of manners towards the ladies of our nation, and are surpris- ingly generous constructionists of our revenue laws. Isabel had profited by every word that she had heard in the ladies' parlor, and she would not ven- ture upon unsafe ground ; but her tender eyea looked her unutterable longing to believe in the charming possibilities that the clerks suggested. She bemoaned herself before the corded silks, which there was no time to have made up ; the piece- velvets and the linens smote her to the heart. But they also stimulated her invention, and she bought and bought of the made-up wares in real or fancied needs, till Basil represented that neither their purses nor their trunks could stand any more. *' O, don't be troubled about the trunks, dearest," she cried, with that gayety which nothing but shopping can kindle in a woman's heart ; while he (altered on from counter to counter, wondering at which he should finally swoon from fatigue. At last, after she had declared repeatedly, " There, aow, I am done," she briskly led the way back to ttie hotel to pack up her purchases. Basil parted with her at the door. He was » 222 THEIB WEDDING JOXJENET. man of high principle himself, and that scene in the smugglers' den, and his wife's preparation for transgression, were revelations for which nothing could have consoled him but a paragon umbrella for five dollars, and an excellent business suit of Scotch goods for twenty. When some hours later he sat with Isabel on the forward promenade of the steamboat for Quebec, and summed up the profits of their shopping, they were both ia the kindliest mood towards the poor Canadians, who had built the admirable city before them. For miles the water front of Montreal is superbly faced with quays and locks of solid stone masonry, and thus she is clean and beautiful to the very feet. Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foul old tumble-down warehcises that dishonor the water- side ia most cities, rise from the broad wharves ; behind these spring the twin towers of Notre Dame, and the steeples of the other churches above the city roofs. " It 's noble, yes, it 's noble, after the best that Europe can show," said Isabel, with enthusiasm ; " and what a pleasant day we've had here I Doesn't even our quarrel show couleur de rose in this light?" " One side of it," answered Basil, dreamily, " but all the rest is black." '' What do you mean, my dear ? " " Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset on it, at the head of the street there." THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 223 The effect was so fine that Isabel could not be angry with him for failing to heed what she had said, and she mused a moment with him. " It seems rather far-fetched," she said presently, "to erect a monument to Nelson in Montreal, doesn't it ? But then, it 's a very absurd monu- ment when you're near it," she added, thought- fully- _ _ Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this Nelson column in Jacques Cartier Square, his thoughts wandered away, not to the hero of the Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navigator, the first white man who ever set foot upon that shore, and who more than three hundred years ago explored the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and in the splendid autumn weather climbed to the top of her green height and named it. The scene that Tacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirage of the past projected upon the present, floated before him, and he saw at the mountain's foot the Indian city of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous lodges of bark, its encircling palisades, and its wide outlying fields of yellow maize. He heard with Jacques Cartier's sense the blare of his followers' trumpets down in the open square of the barbarous city, where the soldiers of many an Old- World fight, " with mustached lip and bearded chin, with arque- buse and glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass," moved among the plumed and painted savages* then he lifted Jacques Cartier's eyes, and looked 224 THEm WEDDING JOUBNEY. out upon the magnificent landscape. " East, west, and north, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue ribbon of the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry, the mighty battle-ground of later centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor, wrapped in illimitable woods." A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westward route to China and the East, some thxee quarters of a century later, had fixed the first trading-post at Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the convent of the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him, and vanished with aU its fleets of fur-traders' boats knd hunters' birch canoes, and the watch-fires of both; and then in the sweet light of the spring morniug, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green mead- ows, that spread aU gay with early flowers where Hochelaga once stood, and with the black-robed Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and devoted nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train, kneeling about the altar raised there in the wilder- ness, and silent amidst the silence of nature at the lifted Host. He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel, ufiing the colors of the historian who has made these scenes the beautiful inheritance of all dream 8PS, and sketched the battles, the miracles, the suf- ferings, and the penances through which the pioog THE SENTIMENT 01' MONTREAL. 22S colony was preserved and prospered, till they both grew impatient of modern Montreal, and would fain have had the ancient Villemarie back in ita place. " Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing in midwinter to the top of the mountaia there, under a heavy cross set with the bones of saints, and planting it on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow to do so if Villemarie were saved from the freshet ; and then of Madame de la Peltrie romantically receiving the sacrament there, while all Villemarie fell dovm adoring! Ah, that was a picturesque people ! When did ever a Boston governor climb to the top of Beaf n hiU in fulfillment of a vow ? To be sure, we may yet see a New York governor doing something of the kind — if he can find a hill. But this ridiculous column to Nelson, who never had anything to do with Montreal," he continued ; it really seems to me the perfect expression of snob- bish colonial dependence and sentimentality, seek- ing always to identify itself with the mother- country, and ignoring the local past and its heroic figures. A column to Nelson in Jacques Cartier Square, on the ground that was trodden by Cham- plain, and won for its present masters by the death of Wolfe ! " The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. Dur- ing supper they were served by French waiters, who, without apparent English of their own, mirac- aloasly understood that of the passengers, except u 226 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. in the case of the furious gentleman who wanted English breakfast tea ; to so much English as that their inspiration did not reach, and they forced him to compromise on cofEee. It was a French boat, owned by a French company, and seemed to ba officered by Frenchmen throughout ; certainly, as our tourists in the joy of their good appetites affirmed, the cook was of that culinarily delightful nation. The boat was almost as large as those of the Hudson, but it was not so lavishly splendid, though it had everything that could minister to the comfort and self-respect of the passengers. These were of all nations, but chiefly Americans, with some French Canadians. The former .gathered on the forward promenade, enjoying what little of the landscape the growing night left visible, and the latter made society after their nianner in the sa- loon. They were plain-looking men and women, mostly, and provincial, it was evident, to their in- most hearts ; provincial ia origin, provincial by in- heritance, by all their circumstances, social and political. Their relation with France was not a proud one, but it was not like submersion by the slip-slop of English colonial loyalty ; yet they seem to be troubled by no memories of their hundred years' dominion of the land that they rescued from ihe wilderness, and that was wrested from them by war. It is a strange fate for any people thus tc have been cut off from the parent-country, and THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL. 227 RbandoneJ to whatever destiny their conquerors chose to reserve for them ; and if each of the race wore the sadness and strangeness of that fate in his countdnance it would not be wonderful. Perhaps it is wonderful that none of them shows anything of the kind. In their desertion they have multiplied and prospered ; they may have a national grief, but they hide it well ; ani probably they have none. Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the per- son of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had shown her and Basil the pictures in the country church. She was confessing to the priost, and she was not at all surprised to find that he was Basil in a suit of medieeval armor. He had an immense cross on his shoulder. " To get this cross to the top of the moimtain," thought Isabel, " we must have two horses. Basil," she added, aloud, " we must have two horses ! " " Ten, if you like, my dear," answered his voice, cheerfully, " though I think we'd better ride up in the omnibus." She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling. " We're in sight of Quebec," he said. " Come out as soon as you can, — come out into the seven- teenth century." IX. QITEBEC. -^/^-h^y^' Isabel hurried out upon the for- ward promenade, where all the other passengers seemed to be as- sembled, and be- held a vast bulk of gray and pur- ple rock, swell- ing two hundred feet up from the mists of the river, and taking the early morn- ing light warm upon its face and crown. Black-hulked, red-chimneyed Liverpool steamers, gay river-craft and ships of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries sped their swift traiSc-laden shuttles ; a lower town clung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populous and picturesque, up its sides ; from the massive cit- QUEBEC. 229 adel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof. Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, mod- em world the vessel steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal, — to her who was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still, after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal past from which she sprung. Upon her height she sits unique ; and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of mediaeval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could intensify. As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming oyer a broad square, a market be- side which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden - side- — ^ walked street stretched an aisle of car- riages and those high swung calash- es, wh'ch are to Quebec what the gon- dolas are to 230 THEIR WEDDING JOUBNET. Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon oui tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were going to the dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be thought of without a pang. It is now closed, and Prcscott Gate, through which they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the sum- mer of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passen- gers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes ; old cannon, thrust endwise into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against pass- ing wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand their pass- ports ? The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch. How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning hour ! On what perverse pretext, then, was it not gome ancient town of Normandy ? " Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and tliey'd soon rattle this old wall down and let in a little fresh air ! " said a patriotic voice at Isabel' » elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow QUEBEC. 2a 1 irregular utreets, 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 I " cried Basil ; and they had a passing glimpse of gray Bt^ne 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 comer of a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The low ceihngs, the thick walls, the clumsy wood-work, the wandering corridors, gave the hotel aU. the de- sired character of age, and its slovenly state be- stowed an additional charm. In another place they might have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they would almost have resented it. By a chance they had the best room in the house, but they held it only till certain people who had engaged it by tele- graph should arrive in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool ; and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The house was very full, and the Ellisons (who had come on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less state only on Hke 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 QuebeCj 232 THEIE WEDDING JOUENEY. and especially infested tlie 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 ia 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 obUge 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, iu buff linen clad from head to foot, was the bride, never became known. Both were equally free with the hiisband, and he was impartially fond of both : it was quite a family affair. For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see the city in company with Miss Ellison ; but it was only a passing weakness. She remembered directly the coolness between friends which she had seen caused by objects of interest in Europe, and she wisely deferred a more intimate acquaintance till it could have a purely social basis. After all, nothing if) so tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy QUEBEC. 2S3 or so apt to end in mutual dislike, — except grati- tude. So the ladies parted friends tUl 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 Ihe scarce-banished winter reminds the Canadian fields of his nearness even in midsummer, though between the bitter showers the air was sultry and close ; and it was just the L'ght 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 af 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 rook overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and 284 THEIK 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 ebns, 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 saiHng 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 Vnto his dying Jiand on the Plains of Abraham , QUEBEC. ^ 235 here Montgomery laid down Ms life at tlie 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 oEBcers' 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 DundrearUy from his fresh Enghsh 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 coidd get anything to do in the States? He scarcely knew what he was fit for, but he thought — to so little in him came the victories he had helped to win in the Crimea, in China, and in India — that he could take care of a gentleman's horse and work 236 THEIR WEDDING JOOBNEY. 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 aim regret that he was not a man of substance enough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs. Drakes and the brood of Ducklings, who had been ahown to him stowed away ia one of those cavemoua rooms ia the earthworks where the married soldien have their quarters. His regret enriched the re- ward of Private Drakes' service, — which perhaps inswered one of Private Drakes' purposet*, 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 farewell as they drove away to the Plains of Abraham. The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St. Louis Koad leading north- ward to the old battle-ground and beyond it ; bufc these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawence and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from the high- way ; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly med- itate whatever emotion he vdU 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 ia full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall was a triumph for all the English-speaking race, and to us Americans, long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her walls or sustained by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with rxnging 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 THEIB 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 WoKe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the ctb 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 ia the Governor's Garden ; and in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalm died, by the same con- querors who raised to Wolfe's memory the column on the battle-field. A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than the rest of the field ; the friendly hollow that 'sheltered him from the fire of the French dwarfs his monument ; yet it is sufficient, and the simple in scription, " Here died Wolfe victorious," gives it a QUEBEC. 289 dignity which many cubits of added stature could not bestow. Another of those bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning's sunshiuej 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 myseK 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 THEIB WEDDING JOURNEY. •lain, for whom tender hearts a way yonder orer the sea were to ache and break ? Did the wretches that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and \rrithe beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl a\/ay for shelter into Uttle hoUows, and behind bushes and fallen trees ! Did he, whose soul was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like some ravening beast ? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the heUish 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 I that, fiU the world with sorrow as thou v^ilt, thou still remaiuest 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 Dieu. 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 tiU 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 ia English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel. They hoped to find there the skuU of Br^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 skuU. They asked if it were not to be seen. " Ah, yes, poor Pere Br^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 P^re Brdbeuf 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- X 242 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. ments with many strugs, but she was pleased ; f