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 surrounded by a group of clamorous Germans of

either sex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lager before

them, and slim flasks of Rhenish; overhead flamed the gas in globes of

varicolored glass; the walls were painted like those of such haunts in

the fatherland; and the wedding-journeyers were fair to linger on

their way, to dwell upon that scene of honest enjoyment, to inhale the

mingling odors of beer and of pipes, and of the pungent cheeses in which

the children of the fatherland delight. Amidst the inspiriting clash of

plates and glasses, the rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse rush

of gutturals, they could catch the words Franzosen, Kaiser, Konig, and

Schlacht, and they knew that festive company to be exulting in the first

German triumphs of the war, which were then the day's news; they saw

fists shaken at noses in fierce exchange of joy, arms tossed abroad in

wild congratulation, and health-pouring goblets of beer lifted in air.

Then they stepped into the moonlight again, and heard only the solemn

organ stops of the cataract. Through garden-ground they were led by the

little maid, their guide, to a small pavilion that stood on the edge

of the precipitous shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls. As

they entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers, passed

out, and they were left alone with that sublime presence. Something of

definiteness was to be desired in the spectacle, but there was ample

compensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgence and the

dense unluminous shadows of the moonshine invested it. The light touched

all the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe sway from the brink of

the cataract, and then desperately breaking and perishing to fall, the

white disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the vast and

deep ravine through which the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed

to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy compactness,

now to disperse into their multitudinous particles and hang like some

vaporous cloud from the cliff. Every moment renewed the vision of beauty

in some rare and fantastic shape; and its loveliness isolated it, in

spite of the great town on the other shore, the station with its bridge

and its trains, the mills that supplied their feeble little needs from

the cataract's strength.

At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the middle of the fall, from

which Sam Patch had made his fatal leap; but Isabel refused to admit

that tragical figure to the honors of her emotions. “I don't care

for him!” she said fiercely. “Patch! What a name to be linked in our

thoughts with this superb cataract.”

“Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust. It's as good a name as

Leander, to my thinking, and it was immortalized in support of a great

idea, the feasibility of all things; while Leander's has come down to us

as that of the weak victim of a passion. We shall never have a poetry of

our own till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts, till we

make the ideal embrace and include the real, till we consent to face the

music in our simple common names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones

into a tragedy. The Germans are braver than we, and in them you find

facts and dreams continually blended and confronted. Here is a fortunate

illustration. The people we met coming out of this pavilion were lovers,

and they had been here sentimentalizing on this superb cataract, as you

call it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be named. No doubt

they had been quoting Uhland or some other of their romantic poets,

perhaps singing some of their tender German 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

enshrined; they fed it heartily and abundantly with the banquet whose

relics we see here.”

On a table before them stood a pair of beer-glasses, in the bottoms

of which lurked scarce the foam of the generous liquor lately brimming

them; some shreds of sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese, bits of cold

ham, crusts of bread, and the ashes of a pipe.

Isabel shuddered at the spectacle, but made no comment, and Basil went

on: “Do you suppose they scorned the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed

upon the falls? On the contrary, I've no doubt that he recalled to her

the ballad which a poet of their language made about him. It used to go

the rounds of the German newspapers, and I translated it, a long while

ago, when I thought that I too was in 'Arkadien geboren'.

'In the Bierhauagarten I linger

By the Falls of the Geneses:

From the Table-Rock in the middle

Leaps a figure bold and free.

Aloof in the air it rises

O'er the rush, the plunge, the death;

On the thronging banks of the river

There is neither pulse nor breath.

Forever it hovers and poises

Aloof in the moonlit air;

As light as mist from the rapids,

As heavy as nightmare.

In anguish I cry to the people,

The long-since vanished hosts;

I see them stretch forth in answer,

The helpless hands of ghosts.'”

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

“I don't see that he got in the name of Sam Patch, after all,” said

Isabel.

“O yes; he did; but I had to yield to our taste, and where he said, I

'Springt der Sam Patsch kuhn and frei',' I made it 'Leaps a figure bold

and free.'”

As they passed through the house on their way out, they saw the youth

and maiden they had met at the pavilion door. They were seated at a

table; two glasses of beer towered before them; on their plates were

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

The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the whole earth was gone

with the moonlight. By nine o'clock, when the wedding-journeyers resumed

their way toward Niagara, the heat had already set in with the effect of

ordinary midsummer's heat at high noon. The car into which they got

had come the past night from Albany, and had an air of almost conscious

shabbiness, griminess, and 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 conductor to have abandoned himself to that

blackest of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the

ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick

lateral motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was

raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts caught away

the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling,

and all the faces on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and

damp with apathetic misery.

The incidents were in harmony with the abject physical tone of the

company. There was a quarrel between a thin, shrill-voiced, highly

dressed, much-bedizened Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old

woman, half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparent ears that

stood out from his head like the handles of a jar, on the other side,

about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept

filled with packages on the pretense that it was engaged. It was a loud

and fierce quarrel enough, but it won no sort of favor; and when the

Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no

lady, and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied, “Highly

complimentary, I must say,” there was no sign of relief or other

acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that there had been a quarrel.

There was a little more interest taken in the misfortune of an old

purblind German and his son, who were found by the conductor to be a few

hundred miles out of the direct course to their destination, and were

with some trouble and the aid of an Americanized fellow-countryman made

aware of the fact. The old man then fell back in the prevailing apathy,

and the child naturally cared nothing. By and by came the unsparing

train-boy on his rounds, bestrewing the passengers successively with

papers, magazines, fine-cut tobacco, and packages of candy. He gave the

old man a package of candy, and passed on. The German took it as the

bounty of the American people, oddly manifested in a situation where he

could otherwise have had little proof of their care. He opened it

and was sharing it with his son when the train-boy came back, and

metallically, like a part of the machinery, demanded, “Ten cents!” The

German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated, “Ten cents! ten cents!”

with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled. When it had

passed through the alien's head that he was to pay for this national

gift and he took with his tremulous fingers from the recesses of his

pocket-book a ten-cent note and handed it to his tormentor, some of

the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and Isabel laughed, and then

looked at each other with eyes of mutual reproach.

“Well, upon my word, my dear,” he said, “I think we've fallen pretty

low. I've never felt such a poor, shabby ruffian before. Good heavens!

To think of our immortal souls being moved to mirth by such a thing

as this,--so stupid, so barren of all reason of laughter. And then the

cruelty of it! What ferocious imbeciles we are! Whom have I married? A

woman with neither heart nor brain!”

“O Basil, dear, pay him back the money--do.”

“I can't. That's the worst of it. He's money enough, and might justly

take offense. What breaks my heart is that we could have the depravity

to smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who supposed he had at

last met with an act of pure kindness. It's a thing to weep over. Look

at these grinning wretches! What a fiendish effect their smiles have,

through their cinders and sweat! O, it's the terrible weather; the

despotism of the dust and heat; the wickedness of the infernal air. What

a squalid and loathsome company!”

At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found themselves with several

hours' time on their hands before the train started for Niagara, and in

the first moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into saying, “Don't

you think we'd have done better to go directly from Rochester to the

Falls, instead of coming this way?”

“Why certainly. I didn't propose coming this way.”

“I know it, dear. I was only asking,” said Isabel, meekly. “But I should

think you'd have generosity enough to take a little of the blame, when I

wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you.”

This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when

Basil made his first visit to Niagara, he had approached from the west

by way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existed

before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his

past, was resolved to draw near the great cataract by no other route.

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his

hard-heartedness. The sigh touched him, and he suggested a carriage-ride

through the city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had

been thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she

was taken by surprise. “If ever we leave Boston,” she said, “we will not

live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we'll come to Buffalo.” She

found that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without

the ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious

freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into

the sky at last, with no line between sharper than that which divides

drowsing from dreaming. But the color was the most charming thing,

that delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of the sea-blue, but

infinitely softer and lovelier. The nearer expanses rippled with dainty

waves, silver and lucent; the further levels made, with 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 islands, and rich farms along its

low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye the shining white of the

rapids,--a hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness to be revealed.

VI. NIAGARA.

As the train stopped, Isabel's heart beat with a child-like exultation,

as I believe every one's heart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara.

She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, that she heard the roar

of the cataract, and now, when she alighted from the car, she was sure

she should have heard it but for the vulgar little noises that attend

the arrival of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere else. “Never

mind, dearest; you shall be stunned with it before you leave,” promised

her husband; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode through the

quaint streets of the village, where it remains a question whether the

lowliness of the shops and private houses makes the hotels look so vast,

or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings. The immense

caravansaries swelling up from among the little bazaars (where they

sell feather fans, and miniature bark canoes, and jars and vases and

bracelets and brooches carved out of the local rocks), made our

friends with their trunks very conscious of their disproportion to the

accommodations of the smallest. They were the sole occupants of the

omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be received at their hotel with

a burst of minstrelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt that a

single stringed instrument of some timid note would have been enough;

and Basil was going to express his own modest preference for a

jew's-harp, when the music ceased with a sudden clash of the cymbals.

But the next moment it burst out with fresh sweetness, and in alighting

they perceived that another omnibus had turned the corner and was

drawing up to the pillared portico of the hotel. A small family

dismounted, and the feet of the last had hardly touched the pavement

when the music again ended as abruptly as those flourishes of trumpets

that usher player-kings upon the stage. Isabel could not help laughing

at this melodious parsimony. “I hope they don't let on the cataract and

shut it off in this frugal style; do they, Basil?” she asked, and passed

jesting through a pomp of unoccupied porters and tallboys. Apparently

there were not many people stopping at this hotel, or else they were

all out looking at the Falls or confined to their rooms. However, our

travellers took in the almost weird emptiness of the place with their

usual gratitude to fortune for all queerness in life, and followed to

the pleasant quarters assigned them. There was time before supper for a

glance at the cataract, and after a brief toilet they sallied out again

upon the holiday street, with its parade of gay little shops, and thence

passed into the grove beside the Falls, enjoying at every instant their

feeling of arrival at a sublime destination.

In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank with Rome, the metropolis

of history and religion; with Venice, the chief city of sentiment and

fantasy. In either you are at once made at home by a perception of its

greatness, in which there is no quality of aggression, as there always

seems to be in minor places as well as in minor men, and you gratefully

accept its sublimity as a fact in no way contrasting with your own

insignificance.

Our friends were beset of course by many carriage-drivers, whom they

repelled with the kindly firmness of experienced travel. Isabel even

felt a compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Niagara so much as

to have forgotten that the first time one must see it alone or only with

the next of friendship. She was voluble in her pity of Basil that it

was not as new to him as to her, till between the trees they saw a white

cloud of spray, shot through and through with sunset, rising, rising,

and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten down by 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 results in part from lifelong acquaintance with every

variety of futile picture of the scene. You have its outward form

clearly in your memory; the shores, the rapids, the islands, the curve

of the Falls, and the stout rainbow with one end resting on their top

and the other lost in the mists that rise from the gulf beneath. On

the whole I do not account this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The

surprise is none the less a surprise because it is kept till the last,

and the marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at

once through a single sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as

if Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred to win your heart

with her beauty; and so Isabel, who was instinctively prepared for the

reverse, suffered a vague disappointment, for a little instant, as she

looked along the verge from the water that caressed the shore at her

feet before it flung itself down, to the wooded point that divides the

American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which showed dimly through

its veil of golden and silver mists the emerald wall of the great

Horse-Shoe. “How still it is!” she said, amidst the roar that shook the

ground under their feet and made the leaves tremble overhead, and “How

lonesome!” amidst the people lounging and sauntering about in every

direction among the trees. In fact that prodigious presence does make

a solitude and silence round every spirit worthy to perceive it, and

it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that the rocks and

pebbles in the water's edge, and the weeds and grasses that nod above

it, have a value far beyond that of such common things elsewhere. In all

the aspects of Niagara there seems a grave simplicity, which is perhaps

a reflection of the spectator's soul for once utterly dismantled of

affectation and convention. In the vulgar reaction from this, you are of

course as trivial, if you like, at Niagara, as anywhere.

Slowly Isabel became aware that the sacred grove beside the fall was

profaned by some very common presences indeed, that tossed bits of stone

and sticks into the consecrated waters, and struggled for handkerchiefs

and fans, and here and there put their arms about each other's waists,

and made a show of laughing and joking. They were a picnic party of

rude, silly folks of the neighborhood, and she stood pondering them in

sad wonder if anything could be worse, when she heard a voice saying to

Basil, “Take you next, Sir? Plenty of light yet, and the wind's down

the river, so the spray won't interfere. Make a capital picture of you;

falls in the background.” It was the local photographer urging them to

succeed the young couple he had just posed at the brink: the gentleman

was sitting down, with his legs crossed and his hands elegantly

disposed; the lady was standing at his side, with one arm thrown lightly

across his shoulder, while with the other hand she thrust his cane into

the ground; you could see it was going to be a splendid photograph.

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trusting as usual to his

sympathy for perception of her train of thought, “Well, I'll never try

to be high-strung again. But shouldn't you have thought, dearest, that I

might expect to be high-strung with success at Niagara if anywhere?” She

passively followed him into the long, queer, downward-sloping edifice on

the border of the grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood ready,

and descended the incline. Emerging into the light again, she found

herself at the foot of the fall by whose top she had just stood. At

first she was glad there were other people down there, as if she and

Basil were not enough to bear it alone, and she could almost have spoken

to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasols and impertinent

little boots, whom their attendant husbands were helping over the sharp

and slippery rocks, so bare beyond the spray, so green and mossy within

the fall of mist. But in another breath she forgot them; as she looked

on that dizzied sea, hurling itself from the high summit in huge white

knots, and breaks and masses, and plunging into the gulf beside her,

while it sent continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and crawled

away in vast eddies, with somehow a look of human terror, bewilderment,

and pain. It was bathed in snowy vapor to its crest, but now and then

heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of the

Falls almost as far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwards how

they were able to make use of but one sense at a time, and how when they

strove to take in the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear

it; but as soon as they released their eyes from this service, every

fibre in them vibrated to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in

it. They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses,

and of a tendency of each to palter with the things perceived. The

eye could no longer take truthful note of quality, and now beheld the

tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of careen marble, white, motionless,

and now as a fall of lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms,

and scarce so much cohesion as would hold them together; and again

they could not discern if this course were from above or from beneath,

whether the water rose from the abyss or dropped from the height. The

ear could give the brain no assurance of the sound that felled it,

and whether it were great or little; the prevailing softness of the

cataract's tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious force or

of prodigious volume. It was only when the sight, so idle in its own

behalf, came to the aid of the other sense, and showed them the mute

movement of each other's lips, that they dimly appreciated the depth of

sound that involved them.

“I think you might have been high-strung there, for a second or two,”

said Basil, when, ascending the incline; he could make himself heard.

“We will try the bridge next.”

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths of

foam, just below the Falls they have in late years woven a web of wire

high in air, and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of all the

bridges made with hands it seems the lightest, most ethereal; it is

ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers like a garland. It

is worthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara, and

to show the traveller the vast spectacle, from the beginning of the

American Fall to the farthest limit of the Horse-Shoe, with all the

awful pomp of the rapids, the solemn darkness of the wooded islands, the

mystery of the vaporous gulf, the indomitable wildness of the shores, as

far as the eye can reach up or down the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by a path that led through

another of those groves which keep the village back from the shores

of the river on the American side, and greatly help the sight-seer's

pleasure in the place. The exquisite structure, which sways so

tremulously from its towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth

where its cables sink into the ground, is to other bridges what the

blood horse is to the common breed of roadsters; and now they felt its

sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them

as they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their

sympathy with the bridge's trepidation was too great for unalloyed

delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there;

and afterwards, at least, they would not have had their airy path seem

more secure.

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that sprung from the base

of the Falls with a mournful, tremulous grace, and a movement weird

as the play of the northern lights. They were touched with the most

delicate purples and crimsons, that darkened to deep red, and then faded

from them at a second look, and they flew upward, swiftly upward, like

troops of pale, transparent ghosts; while a perfectly clear radiance,

better than any other for local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under

the bridge the river smoothly swam, the undercurrents forever unfolding

themselves upon the surface with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all

round with faint lines of white, where the air that filled the water

freed itself in foam. What had been clear green on the face of the

cataract was here more like rich verd-antique, and had a look of

firmness almost like that of the stone itself. So it showed beneath

the bridge, and down the river till the curving shores hid it. These,

springing abruptly from the water's brink, and shagged with pine and

cedar, displayed the tender verdure of grass and bushes intermingled

with the dark evergreens that comb from ledge to ledge, till they point

their speary tops above the crest of bluffs. In front, where tumbled

rocks and expanses of caked clay varied the gloomier and gayer green,

sprung those spectral mists; and through them loomed out, in its

manifold majesty, Niagara, with the seemingly immovable white Gothic

screen of the American Fall, and the green massive curve of the

Horseshoe, solid and simple and calm as an Egyptian wall; while behind

this, with their white and black expanses broken by dark foliaged little

isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed down between their heavily

wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the

sight; and then, looking back from the shore to the spot where they had

stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess itself of all,

and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air like a filmy web,

scarce more passable than the rainbow that flings its arch above the

mists.

On the portico of the hotel they found half a score of gentlemen

smoking, and creating together that collective silence which passes for

sociality on our continent. Some carriages stood before the door, and

within, around the base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle call-boys.

There were a few trunks heaped together in one place, with a porter

standing guard over them; a solitary guest was buying a cigar at the

newspaper stand in one corner; another friendless creature was writing a

letter in the reading-room; the clerk, in a seersucker coat and a lavish

shirt-bosom, tried to give the whole an effect of watering-place gayety

and bustle, as he provided a newly arrived guest with a room.

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and repose with indifference.

If the hotel had been thronged with brilliant company, they would have

been no more and no less pleased; and when, after supper, they came into

the grand parlor, and found nothing there but a marble-topped centre-table,

with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small company of goblets,

they sat down perfectly content in a secluded window-seat. They were

not seen by the three people who entered soon after, and halted in the

centre of the room.

“Why, Kitty!” said one of the two ladies who must be in any

travelling-party of three, “this is more inappropriate to your gorgeous

array than the supper-room, even.”

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for social conquest, in some kind

of airy evening-dress, and was looking round with bewilderment upon that

forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a smile, that

she had not seen so much of the world yet as she had been promised; but

she liked Niagara very much, and perhaps they should find the world at

breakfast.

“No,” said the other lady, who was as unquiet as Kitty was calm, and who

seemed resolved to make the most of the worst, “it isn't probable that

the hotel will fill up overnight; and I feel personally responsible for

this state of things. Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would be

so empty? I thought the place was thronged the whole summer long. How do

you account for it, Richard?”

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-continued discussion

elsewhere of the matter in hand, and he said that he had not been trying

to account for it.

“Then you don't care for Kitty's pleasure at all, and you don't want her

to enjoy herself. Why don't you take some interest in the matter?”

“Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Niagara in the most

satisfactory way, it wouldn't add a soul to the floating population.

Under the circumstances I prefer to leave it unexplained.”

“Do you think it's because it's such a hot summer? Do you suppose

it's not exactly the season? Didn't you expect there'd be more people?

Perhaps Niagara isn't as fashionable as it used to be.”

“It looks something like that.”

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

“I don't know.”

“Perhaps,” interposed Kitty, placidly, “most of the visitors go to the

other hotel, now.”

“It's altogether likely,” said the other lady, eagerly. “There are just

such caprices.”

“Well,” said Richard, “I wanted you to go there.”

“But you said that you always heard this was the a most fashionable.”

“I know it. I didn't want to come here for that reason. But fortune

favors the brave.”

“Well, it's too bad! Here we've asked Kitty to come to Niagara with us,

just to give her a little peep into the world, and you've brought us to

a hotel where we're--”

“Monarchs of all we survey,” suggested Kitty.

“Yes, and start at the sound of our own,” added the other lady,

helplessly.

“Come now, Fanny,” said the gentleman, who was but too clearly the

husband of the last speaker. “You know you insisted, against all I could

say or do, upon coming to this house; I implored you to go to the other,

and now you blame me for bringing you here.”

“So I do. If you'd let me have my own way without opposition about

coming here, I dare say I should have gone to the other place. But never

mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope. She 's your cousin.”

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently folded in her lap. She now

rose and said that she did not know anything about the other hotel, and

perhaps it was just as empty as this.

“It can't be. There can't be two hotels so empty,” said Fanny. “It don't

stand to reason.”

“If you wish Kitty to see the world so much,” said the gentleman, “why

don't you take her on to Quebec, with us?”

Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was moving with a listless

content about the parlor.

“I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she's only come for the night,

and has nothing with her but a few cuffs and collars! I certainly never

heard of anything so absurd before!”

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its charm upon her, for,

after a silence, “I could lend her some things,” she said musingly. “But

don't speak of it to-night, please. It's too ridiculous. Kitty!” she

called out, and, as the young lady drew near, she continued, “How would

you like to go to Quebec, with us?”

“O Fanny!” cried Kitty, with rapture; and then, with dismay, “How can

I?”

“Why, very well, I think. You've got this dress, and your

travelling-suit; and I can lend you whatever you want. Come!” she added

joyously, “let's go up to your room, and talk it over!”

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and the gentleman followed.

To their own relief the guiltless 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 enjoyment of her inconsequence.

“Yes, poor thing!” returned his wife; “it's no light matter to invite

a young lady to take a journey with you, and promise her all sorts of

gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and 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!”

“I don't understand what you mean, Basil. It was the only thing that

she could do, to invite the young lady to go on with them. I wonder her

husband had the sense to think of it first. Of course she'll have to

lend her things.”

“And you didn't observe anything peculiar in her way of reaching her

conclusions?”

“Peculiar? What do you mean?”

“Why, her blaming her husband for letting her have her own way about

the hotel; and her telling him not to mention his proposal to Kitty,

and then doing it herself, just--after she'd pronounced it absurd and

impossible.” He spoke with heat at being forced to make what he thought

a needless explanation.

“O!” said Isabel, after a moment's reflection. “That! Did you think it

so very odd?”

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man must feel when he

begins to perceive that he has married the whole mystifying world of

womankind in the woman of his choice, and made no answer. But to his own

soul he said: “I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance.

It seems I have been flattering myself.”

The next morning they went out as they had planned, for an exploration

of Goat Island, after an early breakfast. As they sauntered through

the village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, they

praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday character of the place,

enjoying equally the lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers

and their carriages to let, and the little shops, with nothing but

mementos of Niagara, and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery, to sell.

Shops so useless, they agreed, could not be found outside the Palms

Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world

but here. They felt themselves once more a part of the tide of mere

sight-seeing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in other days,

and in an eddy of which their love itself had opened its white blossom,

and lily-like dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of newly wedded bliss,

which, involving the whole land during the season of bridal-tours, may

be said to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel

of a precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal

couples, and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien

there, and must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for

his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man

of any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses

to the collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside

world to which he belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and brides. Three

or four with the benediction still on them, come down in the same car

with him; he hands her 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! What is Niagara to these things?

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sisterhood to these blessed

souls; but she secretly rejoiced in it, even while she joined Basil in

noting their number and smiling at their innocent abandon. She dropped

his arm at encounter of the first couple, and walked carelessly at his

side; she made a solemn vow never to take hold of his watch-chain in

speaking to him; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting

her face very close to his at dinner in studying the bill of fare;

getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the waist.

All ascetic resolutions are modified by experiment; but if Isabel did

not rigorously keep these, she is not the less to be praised for having

formed them.

Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Island, they passed a

little group of the Indians still lingering about Niagara, who make the

barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and, like the woods and the

wild faces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep the cataract

remote, and to invest it with the charm of primeval loneliness. This

group were women, and they sat motionless on the ground, smiling

sphinx-like over their laps full of bead-work, and turning their dark

liquid eyes of invitation upon the passers. They wore bright kirtles,

and red shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and

down their comfortable persons. A little girl with them was attired in

like gayety of color. “What is her name?” asked Isabel, paying for a

bead pincushion. “Daisy Smith,” said her mother, in distressingly good

English. “But her Indian name?” “She has none,” answered the woman, who

told Basil that her village numbered five hundred people, and that they

were Protestants. While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whom

the women saluted musically in their native tongue. This was somewhat

consoling; but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and it could have been

wished that he had not a silk hat on.

“Still,” said Isabel, as they turned away, “I'm glad he hasn't

Lisle-thread gloves, like that chieftain we saw putting his forest

queen on board the train at Oneida. But how shocking that they should be

Christians, and Protestants! It would have been bad enough to have them

Catholics. And that woman said that they were increasing. They ought to

be fading away.”

On the bridge, they paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing

down the slope in all their wild variety, with the white crests of

breaking surf, the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the fleet,

smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy

swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the deathful course beneath

their feet, gave a shudder to the horror of being cast upon it, and then

hurried over the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose wildness

they sought refuge from the sight and sound.

There had been rain in the night; the air war full of forest fragrance,

and the low, sweet voice of twittering birds. Presently they came to a

bench set in a corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vista of

sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam of the foaming river beyond. As they

sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their courtship,

began to recite a poem. It was one which had been haunting him since his

first sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart

in his youth--the rhyme of some poor newspaper poet, whom the third or

fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly

clipping his name from the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil's

memory, rather from the interest of the awful fact it recorded, than

from any merit of its own; and now he recalled it with a distinctness

that surprised him.

AVERY.

I.

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore, Heard, or

seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar, Out of the hell of the

rapids as 'twere a lost soul's cries Heard and could not believe; and

the morning mocked their eyes, Showing where wildest and fiercest the

waters leaped up and ran Raving round him and past, the visage of a man

Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught Fast

in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught. Was it a life,

could it be, to yon slender hope that clung Shrill, above all the tumult

the answering terror rang.

II.

Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned, Over the

rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound, And the long, fateful

hours of the morning have wasted soon, As it had been in some blessed

trance, and now it is noon. Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it

strong and stanch, And to the lines and the treacherous rocks look well

as you launch Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprent

sides, Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides, Onward

rushes the raft, with many a lurch and leap,--Lord! if it strike him

loose from the hold he scarce can keep! No! through all peril unharmed,

it reaches him harmless at least, And to its proven strength he lashes

his weakness fast. Now, for the shore! But steady, steady, my men, and

slow; Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so, let her go!

Thronging the shores around stands the pitying multitude; Wan as his

own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to brood Heavy upon them,

and heavy the silence hangs on all, Save for the rapids' plunge, and the

thunder of the fall. But on a sudden thrills from the people still

and pale, Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail Caught on a

lurking point of rock it sways and swings, Sport of the pitiless waters,

the raft to which he clings.

III.

All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways; And on the shore the

crowd lifts up its hands and prays: Lifts to heaven and wrings the hands

so helpless to save, Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock and

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

Straggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life, Tugging

at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon. Priceless second by

second, so wastes the afternoon. And it is sunset now; and another boat

and the last Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely

passed.

IV.

Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay

Maddening against the gate that is locked athwart his way. “No! we keep

the bridge for them that can help him. You, Tell us, who are you?” “His

brother!” “God help you both! Pass through.” Wild, with wide arms of

imploring he calls aloud to him, Unto the face of his brother, scarce

seen in the distance dim; But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering

words are lost As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed.

And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope Holding him

to the raft, and rise secure in his hope; Sees all as in a dream the

terrible pageantry, Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds

flying free; Sees, then, the form--that, spent with effort and fasting

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

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

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

“O Basil!” said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking the hush that best

praised the unknown poet's skill, “it isn't true, is it?”

“Every word, almost, even to the brother's coming at the last moment.

It's a very well-known incident,” he added, and I am sure the reader

whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly every point of interest

about the place has killed its man, and there might well be a deeper

stain of crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching the

falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy

as the lightest-hearted tourist could desire. The abominable savages,

revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of

demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two

hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these

squalid devil-worshippers; the French planting the fort that yet guards

the mouth of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited

afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole Niagara country;

the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of

France and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac,

where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the

precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon

the American settlements in the Revolution by the savages who prepared

their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and

of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of

the fall; the savage forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and the

blazing villages on either shore in the War of 1812,--these are the

memories of the place, the links in a chain of tragical interest

scarcely broken before our time since the white man first beheld the

mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect

as Basil, in the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the

reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories,--those precious books that

make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European

days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval

chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom,--and then, lacking this

light, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and

Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists

dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe

and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal

couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could

transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised

their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the

tradition of its awful power; only they refused their cheap and selfish

compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years in its

conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This

public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life,

and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to

that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai

Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the

Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to

rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of the new

temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands

every year. The shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a

deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they

met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the

hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should also abound in

them; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from 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 rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature

in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far

from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground of every famous

American landscape; and when I think of the amount of public love-making

in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite,

and from the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our

continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth

century is the golden age, and that we want very little of being a

nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having

traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now

drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant

have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that

constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or rather of people

whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new

from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this

illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with

evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was

a wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness

of pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three

little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out

into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges connect them

now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge

rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The

Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled

woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination

of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded

from exploring them. It wants no courage to do this, but merely

submission to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward

than the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no

human being had perhaps set foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge

with a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence,

through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at

the heaving and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which at every

instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told

heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil another

revelation of character. Without the slightest warning she sank down

at the root of a tree, and said, with serious composure, that she could

never go back on those bridges; they were not safe. He stared at her

cowering form in blank amaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Then

it occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and he

said, “Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat.”

“O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!” implored Isabel. “You

see yourself the bridges are not safe. Do get a boat.”

“Or a balloon,” he suggested, humoring the pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his knees at her side, and

took her hands in his. “Isabel! Isabel! Are you crazy?” he cried, as if

he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered in reply; he said,

to mend matters, that it was a jest, about the boat; and he was driven

to despair when Isabel repeated, “I never can go back by the bridges,

never.”

“But what do you propose to do?”

“I don't know, I don't know!”

He would try sarcasm. “Do you intend to set up a hermitage here, and

have your meals sent out from the hotel? It's a charming spot, and

visited pretty constantly; but it's small, even for a hermitage.”

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered that

he was not ashamed to make fun of her.

He would try kindness. “Perhaps, darling, you'll let me carry you

ashore.”

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

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

“Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids,” she said, looking up fiercely.

“The bridges are not safe. I'm not a child, Basil. O, what shall we do?”

“I don't know,” said Basil, gloomily. “It's an exigency for which I

wasn't prepared.” Then he silently gave himself to the Evil One, for

having probably overwrought Isabel's nerves by repeating that poem about

Avery, and by the ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to

enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it; and she answered, “O no,

it's nothing but the bridges.” He proved to her that the bridges, upon

all known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give

way. She shook her head, but made no answer, and he lost his patience.

“Isabel,” he cried, “I'm ashamed of you!”

“Don't say anything you'll be sorry for afterwards, Basil,” she replied,

with the forbearance of those who have reason and justice on their side.

The rapids beat and shouted round their little prison-isle, each billow

leaping as if possessed by a separate demon. The absurd horror of the

situation overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore, for

she might spring from his grasp into the flood. He could not leave her

to call for help; and what if nobody came till she lost her mind

from terror? Or, what if somebody should come and find them in that

ridiculous affliction?

Somebody was coming!

“Isabel!” he shouted in her ear, “here come those people we saw in the

parlor last night.”

Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil's with her icy

hand, rose, drew her arm convulsively through his, and walked ashore

without a word.

In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly “repaired her

drooping head and tricked her beams” again. He could see her tearfully

smiling through her veil. “My dear,” he said, “I don't ask an

explanation of your fright, for I don't suppose you could give it. But

should you mind telling me why those people were so sovereign against

it?”

“Why, dearest! Don't you understand? That Mrs. Richard--whoever she

is--is so much like me.”

She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfying statement, and

he thought he had better not ask further then, but wait in hope that the

meaning would come to him. They walked on in silence till they came to

the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a notice that persons have

been killed by pieces of rock from the precipice overhanging the shore

below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabel

declined to visit the Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but

was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower. “Thanks; no,” said her

husband. “You might find it unsafe to come back the way you went up.

We can't count certainly upon the appearance of the lady who is so much

like you; and I've no fancy for spending my life on Terrapin Tower.” So

he found her a seat, and went alone to the top of the audacious little

structure standing on the verge of the cataract, between the smooth

curve of the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Central Fall,

with the stormy sea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen

through the mists, crawling away between its lofty bluffs before. He

knew again the awful delight with which so long ago he had watched

the changes in the beauty of the Canadian Fall as it hung a mass of

translucent green from the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl up

from the abyss, and penetrate all its substance to the very crest, and

then suddenly vanished from it, and perpetually renewed the same effect.

The mystery of the rising vapors veiled the gulf into which the cataract

swooped; the sun shone, and a rainbow dreamed upon them.

Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge,

and here Basil saw an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone

to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss, who, when

he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank

bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that

he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman

took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a

distinguished phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had

equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

“On your bridal tour, I presume,” he continued, as they approached the

bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain,

middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward

festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. “Well, this is

my third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife's been here once before on

the same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table

Rock with the others. Now that's all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move

on?” he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply,

by the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet

pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table next Basil's, and they

were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious

dining-hall.

“Well, Kitty,” the married lady was saying, “you can tell the girls what

you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'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 flirtation with the gentleman of the long

blond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he's got to

do duty in accounting for my missing glove. It'll never do to tell the

girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny,

I really can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners,

waited upon by their black servants.”

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted

in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the

first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a

half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its

way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their

child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact

did not quite answer to the young lady's description of it, and get

it certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of

bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he

used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled

to find it so changed.

“Yes,” he said, “I can't account for him except as the ghost of Southern

travel, and I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that

almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are

fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish

the remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce. The

impoverished slave-holder is a pathetic figure, in spite of all justice

and reason, the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and it is of

no use to think of Andersonville in his presence. This gentleman, and

others like him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent

the money they did not earn like princes; they held their heads high;

they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair; they received the

homage of the doughface in his home. They came up here from their

rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bullied the whole busy civilization

of the North. Everybody who had merchandise or principles to sell

truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphal progress. Now

they're moneyless and subjugated (as they call it), there's none so poor

to do them reverence, and it's left for me, an Abolitionist from the

cradle, to sigh over their fate. After all, they had noble traits, and

it was no great wonder they got, to despise us, seeing what most of

us were. It seems to me I should like to know our friend. I can't help

feeling towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven

spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feels towards him. I dare say he

admires him immensely.”

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

contrasted the scene with that which the same place formerly presented.

“In the old time,” he said, “every table was full, and we dined to the

music of a brass band. I can't say I liked the band, but I miss it.

I wonder if our Southern friend misses it? They gave us a very small

allowance of brass band when we arrived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder

what's come over the place,” he said, as the Southern party, rising from

the table, walked out of the dining-room, attended by many treacherous

echoes in spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters

made.

After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House,

towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara.

As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash

of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly

strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as

a demon; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the

business-like composure of the man who shows off the hell-broth) is

added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara gradually changes

from a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all odds, too, the

most tremendous view of the Falls is afforded by the point on the drive

whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe, and behold its three massive

walls of sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, the color

gone, and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy.

Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy's Lane? asked the

driver at a certain point on their return; but Isabel did not care for

battle-fields, and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence of

his former visit. “They have a sort of tower of observation built on the

battle-ground,” he said, as they drove on down by the river, “and it was

in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, who had helped his countrymen

to be beaten in the fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible

account of the battle, asking me first if I had ever heard of General

Scott, and adding without flinching that here he got his earliest

laurels. He seemed to go just so long to every listener, and nothing

could stop him short, so I fell into a revery until he came to an end.

It was hard to remember, that sweet summer morning, when the sun shone,

and the birds sang, and the music of a piano and a girl's voice rose

from a bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted

with battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been planted with

cannon, instead of potatoes and corn, and that where the cows came

down the farmer's lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men had

befallen. The blue and tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away

rolled the beautiful land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and at

the foot of the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past

seemed only a vagary of mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior at my

elbow?--grieved though I was to find that a habit of strong drink

had the better of his utterance that morning. My driver explained

afterwards, that persons visiting the field were commonly so much

pleased with the captain's eloquence, that they kept the noble old

soldier in a brandy-and-water rapture throughout the season, thereby

greatly refreshing his memory, and making the battle bloodier and

bloodier as the season advanced and the number of visitors increased.

There my dear,” he suddenly broke off, as they came in sight of a

slender stream of water that escaped from the brow of a cliff on the

American side below the Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery

mist, “that's the Bridal Veil; and I suppose you think the stream, which

is making such a fine display, yonder, is some idle brooklet, ending a

long course of error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge.

It's nothing of the kind; it's an honest hydraulic canal, of the most

straightforward character, a poor but respectable mill-race which has

devoted itself strictly to business, and has turned mill-wheels instead

of fooling round water-lilies. It can afford that ultimate finery. What

you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry.”

“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 unguarded by any sort of

parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we manage things

differently on our continent, and carriages go running over the brink

from time to time.

“If your thoughts have that direction,” answered her husband, “we had

better go back to the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow

morning. It's late for it to-day, at any rate.” He had treated Isabel

since the adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he

felt himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse.

“I'm not afraid,” she sighed, “but in the words of the retreating

soldier, I--I'm awfully demoralized;” and added, “You know we must

reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this evening.”

Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to

Boston by way of Montreal and Quebec, and it was part of their pleasure

to get these of the heartiest imaginable ticket-agent. He was a colonel

or at least a major, and he made a polite feint of calling Basil by some

military title. He commended the trip they were about to make as the

most magnificent and beautiful on the whole continent, and he commended

them for intending to make it. He said that was Mrs. General Bowdur of

Philadelphia who just went out; did they know her? Somehow, the titles

affected Basil as of older date than the late war, and as belonging to

the militia period; and he imagined for the agent the romance of a

life spent at a watering-place, in contact with rich money-spending,

pleasure-taking people, who formed his whole jovial world. The Colonel,

who included them in this world, and thereby brevetted them rich and

fashionable, could not secure a state-room for them on the boat,--a

perfectly splendid Lake steamer, which would take them down the rapids

of the St. Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change,--but he would

give them a letter to the captain, who was a very particular friend of

his, and would be happy to show them as his friends every attention; and

so he wrote a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of

all reason making him feel for the moment that he was privileged by a

document which was no doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in

a loud cheerful voice; he laughed jollily at no apparent joke; he bowed

very low and said, “GOOD-evening!” at parting, and they went away as if

he had blessed them.

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering through the village,

charmed with its bizarre mixture of quaintness and commonplaceness; in

hanging about the shop-windows with their monotonous variety of feather

fans,--each with a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed in

its centre,--moccasins, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows

and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the neighboring squaws

can invent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricing many things,

and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses,

quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative

pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological

formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heat of the gas-lights

and the persistence of the mosquitoes. There were very few people

besides themselves in the shops, and Isabel's purchases were not lavish.

Her husband had made up his mind to get her some little keepsake; and

when he had taken her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops, and

hastily bought her a feather fan,--a magnificent thing of deep magenta

dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the

centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, “Who's that

for, Basil?” demanded his wife; “the cook?” But seeing his ghastly

look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, “O you poor old tasteless

darling! You've got it for me!” and seemed about to die of laughter.

“Didn't you start and throw up your hands,” he stammered, “when you came

to that case of fans?”

“Yes,--in horror! Did you think I liked the cruel things, with

their dead birds and their hideous colors? O Basil, dearest! You are

incorrigible. Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues

that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature? Now, my

love, just promise me one thing,” she said pathetically. “We're going

to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhaps you'll be

wanting to surprise me with something there. Don't do it. Or if you

must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color of it's to

be; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there'll be some

taste about it, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased.”

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something

about exchanging it. “No,” she said, “we'll keep it as a--a--monument.”

And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud

height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day.

So completely were their places changed, that he doubted if it were not

he who had made that scene on the Third Sister; and when Isabel said,

“O, why won't men use their reasoning faculties?” he could not for

himself have claimed any, and he could not urge the truth: that he had

bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty.

She would not let him get angry, and he could say nothing against the

half-ironical petting with which she soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning they

spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat

Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place on whose

wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first. They

had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled

at the greed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations. They

could not conceive why people should want to descend the inclined

railway to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at the idea of

going up Terrapin Tower; they derided the vulgar daring of those who

went out upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw about to

go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had no words to

express their contempt.

Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool, mistakenly going down

on the American side, for it is much better seen from the other, though

seen from any point it is the most impressive feature of the whole

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 scene of secret power, so different from the

thunderous splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every

side, to a height of two hundred feet, clothed from the water's edge

almost to their create with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your

senses perceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then, drunk

and wild, with brawling rapids roar away to Ontario through the narrow

channel of the river. Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it

that you do not know the half of its terribleness; for those waters that

look so smooth are great ridges and rings, forced, by the impulse of the

currents, twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin. Nothing

can live there, and with what is caught in its hold, the maelstrom plays

for days, and whirls and tosses round and round in its toils, with a

sad, maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories, which even

their telling does not wholly rob of ghastliness, about the bodies of

drowned men carried into the whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy

surges a travesty of life, apparently floating there at their pleasure,

diving and frolicking amid the waves, or frantically struggling to

escape from the death that has long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway suspension bridge, is an

elevator more than a hundred and eighty feet high, which is meant to

let people down to the shore below, and to give a view of the rapids

on their own level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a terribly frail

structure of pine sticks, but is doubtless stronger than it looks; and

at any rate, as it has never yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced

perfectly safe.

In the waiting-room at the top, Basil and Isabel found Mr. Richard and

his ladies again, who got into the movable chamber with them, and they

all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind,

either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the

lugubrious upper part of the structure, where it was darkened by a rough

weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the

grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the

audacious slightness of the elevator.

An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingled in Isabel's heart

with a doubt of the value of the scene below, and she could not look

forward to escape from her present perils by the conveyance which had

brought her into them, with any satisfaction. She wanly smiled, and

shrank closer to Basil; while the other matron made nothing of seizing

her husband violently by the arm and imploring him to stop it whenever

they experienced a rougher jolt than usual.

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out of their prison by a

humid young Englishman, with much clay on him, whose face was red and

bathed in perspiration, for it was very hot down there in his little

inclosure of baking pine boards, and it was not much cooler out on the

rocks upon which the party issued, descending and descending by repeated

and desultory flights of steps, till at last they stood upon a huge

fragment of stone right abreast of the rapids. Yet it was a magnificent

sight, and for a moment none of them were sorry to have come. The surges

did not look like the gigantic ripples on a river's course as they were,

but like a procession of ocean billows; they arose far aloft in vast

bulks of clear green, and broke heavily into foam at the crest. Great

blocks and shapeless fragments of rock strewed the margin of the awful

torrent; gloomy walls of dark stone rose naked from these, bearded

here and there with cedar, and everywhere frowning with shaggy brows of

evergreen. The place is inexpressibly lonely and dreadful, and one feels

like an alien presence there, or as if he had intruded upon some mood

or haunt of Nature in which she had a right to be forever alone. The

slight, impudent structure of the elevator rises through the solitude,

like a thing that merits ruin, yet it is better than something more

elaborate, for it looks temporary, and since there must be an elevator,

it is well to have it of the most transitory aspect. Some such quality

of rude impermanence consoles you for the presence of most improvements

by which you enjoy Niagara; the suspension bridges for their part being

saved from 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 waiting room at the top,

“What I like about these little adventures,” said Mr. Richard to Basil,

abruptly, “is getting safely out of them. Good-morning, sir.” He bowed

slightly to Isabel, who returned his politeness, and exchanged faint

nods, or glances, with the ladies. They got into their separate

carriages, and at that safe distance made each other more decided

obeisances.

“Well,” observed Basil, “I suppose we're introduced now. We shall be

meeting them from time to time throughout our journey. You know how the

same faces and the same trunks used to keep turning up in our travels on

the other side. Once meet people in travelling, and you can't get rid of

them.”

“Yes,” said Isabel, as if continuing his train of thought, “I'm glad

we're going 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

cataract brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools; I'm no longer yours, Basil;

I'm most unhappily married to Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my

awful 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 existence 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 approval, and to feel that

it will not cease when we go away. The second day makes us its abject

slaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in terror. I believe

some people stay for weeks, however, and hordes of them have written

odes to Niagara.”

“I can't understand it, at all,” said Isabel. “I don't wonder now that

the town should be so empty this season, but that it should ever be

full. I wish we'd gone after our first look at the Falls from the

suspension bridge. How beautiful that was! I rejoice in everything that

I haven't done. I'm so glad I haven't been in the Cave of the Winds; I'm

so happy that Table Rock fell twenty years ago! Basil, I couldn't stand

another rainbow today. I'm sorry we went out on the Three Weird Sisters.

O, I shall dream about it! and the rush, and the whirl, and the dampness

in one's face, and the everlasting chirr-r-r-r of everything!”

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a moment's oblivion, and then

rose radiant with a question: “Why in the world, if Niagara is really

what it seems to us now, do so many bridal parties come here?”

“Perhaps they're the only people who've the strength to bear up against

it, and are not easily dispersed and subjected by it.”

“But we're dispersed and subjected.”

“Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who knows how it would be if you

were nineteen instead of twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turned

of thirty?”

“Basil, you're very cruel.”

“No, no. But don't you see how it is? We've known too much of life to

desire any gloomy background for our happiness. We're quite contented

to have things gay and bright about us. Once we couldn't have made

the circle dark enough. Well, my dear, that's the effect of age. We're

superannuated.”

“I used to think I was before we were married,” answered Isabel simply;

“but now,” she added triumphantly, “I'm rescued from all that. I shall

never be old again, dearest; never, as long as you love me!”

They were about to enter the village, and he could not make any open

acknowledgment of her tenderness; but her silken mantle (or whatever)

slipped from her shoulder, and he embracingly replaced it, flattering

himself that he had delicately seized this chance of an unavowed

caress and not allowing (O such is the blindness of our sex!) that the

opportunity had been yet more subtly afforded him, with the art which

women never disuse 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

travelling-dress; two occupied the parlor as they passed out; half a

dozen happy pairs arrived (to the music of the band) in the omnibus

that was to carry our friends back to the station; they caught sight of

several about the shop windows, as that drove through the streets. Thus

the place perpetually renews itself in the glow of love as long as the

summer lasts. The moon which is elsewhere so often of wormwood, or of

the ordinary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from

the first of June to the last of October; and this is a great charm in

Niagara. I think with tenderness of all the lives that have opened so

fairly there; the hopes that have reigned in the glad young hearts;

the measureless tide of joy that ebbs and flows with the arriving and

departing trains. Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and of

fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak: but here only youth,

faith, rapture. I kiss my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I

were a poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towards the weak sisterhood

of evident brides, and both our friends felt a lurking fondness for

Niagara at the last moment. I do not know how much of their content

was due to the fact that they had suffered no sort of wrong there, from

those who are apt to prey upon travellers. In the hotel a placard warned

them to have nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen on the streets,

but always to order their carriage at the office; on the street the

hackmen whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant drivers in league

with the landlords; yet their actual experience was great reasonableness

and facile contentment with the sum agreed upon.

This may have been because the hackmen so far outnumbered the visitors,

that the latter could dictate terms; but they chose to believe it a

triumph of civilization; and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their

faith. Only at the station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt,

by the hotel porter who professed to find Basil's trunk enfeebled by

travel, and 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

unjustly suspected.

VII. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte, the port of

Rochester, and they rattled uneventfully down from Niagara by rail. At

the broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad

station; and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basil looked to

the transfer of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business by the

respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for

the boat. He was slow, and his system was not good,--he did not

give checks for the pieces, but marked them with the name of their

destination; and there was that indefinable something in his manner

which hinted his hope that you would remember the porter; but he was

so civil that he did not snub the meekest and most vexatious of the

passengers, and Basil mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white

Americans, he said to himself, would behave so decently in his place;

and he could not conceive of the American steamboat clerk who would use

the politeness towards a waiting crowd that the Canadian purser showed

when they all wedged themselves in about his window to receive their

stateroom keys. He was somewhat awkward, like the porter, but he was

patient, and he did not lose his temper even when some of the crowd,

finding he would not bully them, made bold to bully him. He was three

times as long in serving them as an American would have been, but their

time was of no value there, and he served them well. Basil made a point

of speaking him fair, when his turn came, and the purser did not trample

on him for a base truckler, as an American jack-in-office would have

done.

Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer, which was very

comfortable, and in every way sufficient for its purpose, with a visible

captain, who answered two or three questions very pleasantly, and bore

himself towards his passengers in some sort like a host.

In the saloon Isabel had found among the passengers her

semi-acquaintances of the hotel parlor and the Rapids-elevator, and had

glanced tentatively towards them. Whereupon the matron of the party

had made advances that ended in their all sitting down together and

wondering when the boat would start, and what time they would get to

Montreal next evening, with other matters that strangers going upon

the same journey may properly marvel over in company. The introduction

having thus accomplished itself, they exchanged addresses, and it

appeared that Richard was Colonel Ellison, of Milwaukee, and that Fanny

was his wife. Miss Kitty Ellison was of Western New York, not far from

Erie. There was a diversion presently towards the different state-rooms;

but the new acquaintances sat vis-a-vis at the table, and after supper

the ladies drew their chairs together on the promenade deck, and enjoyed

the fresh evening breeze. The sun set magnificent upon the low western

shore which they had now left an hour away, and a broad stripe of color

stretched behind the steamer. A few thin, luminous clouds darkened

momently along the horizon, and then mixed with the land. The stars came

out in a clear sky, and a light wind softly buffeted the cheeks, and

breathed life into nerves that the day's heat had wasted. It scarcely

wrinkled the tranquil expanse of the lake, on which loomed, far or near,

a full-sailed schooner, and presently melted into the twilight, and left

the steamer solitary upon the waters. The company was small, and not

remarkable enough in any way to take the thoughts of any one off his own

comfort. A deep sense of the coziness of the situation possessed them

all which was if possible intensified by the spectacle of the captain,

seated on the upper deck, and smoking a cigar that flashed and fainted

like a stationary fire-fly in the gathering dusk. How very distant,

in this mood, were the most recent events! Niagara seemed a fable of

antiquity; the ride from Rochester a myth of the Middle Ages. In this

cool, happy world of quiet lake, of starry skies, of air that the soul

itself seemed to breathe, there was such consciousness of repose as if

one were steeped in rest and soaked through and through with calm.

The points of likeness between Isabel and Mrs. Ellison shortly made them

mutually uninteresting, and, leaving her husband to the others, Isabel

frankly sought the companionship of Miss Kitty, in whom she found a

charm of manner which puzzled at first, but which she presently fancied

must be perfect trust of others mingling with a peculiar self-reliance.

“Can't you see, Basil, what a very flattering way it is?” she asked of

her husband, when, after parting with their friends for the night, she

tried to explain the character to him. “Of course no art could equal

such a natural gift; for that kind 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 Isabel

meant Boston, and she went on to praise the young lady's intelligence

and refinement, with those expressions of surprise at the existence of

civilization in a westerner which westerners find it so hard to receive

graciously. Happily, Miss Ellison had not to hear them. “The reason she

happened to come with only two dresses is, she lives so near Niagara

that she could come for one day, and go back the next. The colonel's her

cousin, and he and his wife go East every year, and they asked her

this time to see Niagara with them. She told me all over again what

we eavesdropped so shamefully in the hotel parlor;--and I don't know

whether she was better pleased with the prospect of what's before her,

or with the notion of making the journey in this original way. She

didn't force her confidence upon me, any more than she tried to withhold

it. We got to talking in the most natural manner; and she seemed to tell

these things about herself because they amused her and she liked me. I

had been saying how my trunk got left behind once on the French side of

Mont Cenis, and I had to wear aunt's things at Turin till it could be

sent for.”

“Well, I don't see but Miss Ellison could describe you to her friends

very much as you've described her to me,” said Basil. “How did these

mutual confidences begin? Whose trustfulness first flattered the

other's? What else did you tell about yourself?”

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

“O, you did!”

“Why, dearest! I wanted to know, for once, you see, whether we seemed

honeymoon-struck.”

“And do we?”

“No,” came the answer, somewhat ruefully. “Perhaps, Basil,” she added,

“we've been a little too successful in disguising our bridal character.

Do you know,” she continued, looking him anxiously in the face, “this

Miss Ellison took me at first for--your sister!”

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter. “One more such victory,” he

said, “and we are undone;” and he laughed again, immoderately. “How sad

is the fruition of human wishes! There's nothing, after all, like a

good thorough failure for making people happy.”

Isabel did not listen to him. Safe in a dim corner of the deserted

saloon, she seized him in a vindictive embrace; then, as if it had been

he who suggested the idea of such a loathsome relation, hissed out the

hated words, “Your sister!” and released him with a disdainful repulse.

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at the Canadian city of

Kingston, a handsome place, substantial to the water's edge, and giving

a sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built.

There was an accession of many passengers here, and they and the people

on the wharf were as little like Americans as possible. They were

English or Irish or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old World

still upon their faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty;

so that one must wonder if the line between the Dominion and the United

States did not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These

provincials had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our

careworn sensibility of expression; but neither had they our complexions

of adobe; and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the

whole, better dressed than the same number of average Americans would

have been in a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores who were

putting the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly

way with the orange-women and the old women picking up chips on the

pier; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyond

the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years

ago; of Count Frontenac's splendid advent among the Indians; of the

brave La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of wars with the

savages and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their

allies harried from this point; of the destruction of La Salle's fort

in the Old French War; and of final surrender a few years later to the

English. It is as picturesque as it is historical. All about the

city, the shores are beautifully wooded, and there are many lovely

islands,--the first indeed of those Thousand Islands with which the head

of the St. Lawrence is filled, and among which the steamer was presently

threading her way. They are still as charming and still almost as wild

as when, in 1673, Frontenac's flotilla of canoes passed through their

labyrinth and issued upon the lake. Save for a light-house upon one

of them, there is almost nothing to show that the foot of man has ever

pressed the thin grass clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping

its green in the eternal shadow of their pines and cedars. In the warm

morning light they gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel,

which some of them almost touched with the plumage of their evergreens;

and where none of them were large, some were so small that it would

not have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race of water-birds

assembling and separating in her course. It is curiously affecting to

find them so unclaimed yet from the solitude of the vanished wilderness,

and scarcely touched even by tradition. But for the interest left them

by the French, these tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and

must be enjoyed for their beauty alone. There is indeed about them a

faint light of legend concerning the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for

several patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their lovely

multitude; but this episode of modern history is difficult for the

imagination to manage, and somehow one does not take sentimentally even

to that daughter of a lurking patriot, who long baffled her father's

pursuers by rowing him from one island to another, and 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 of the painful fragility of the latter. Her

expression was just a little vacant, it must be owned; but so far as she

went she was faultless. She looked like the most tractable of daughters,

and as if she would be the most obedient of wives. She had a blameless

taste in dress, Isabel declared; her costume of blue and white striped

Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set upon heavy masses of dark brown hair) being

completed by a black silk skirt. “And you can see,” she added, “that

it's an old skirt made over, and that she's dressed as cheaply as she

is prettily.” This surprised Basil, who had imputed the young lady's

personal sumptuousness to her dress, and had thought it enormously

rich. When she got off with her chaperone at one of the poorest-looking

country landings, she left them in hopeless conjecture about her. Was

she visiting there, or was the interior of Canada full of such stylish

and exquisite creatures? Where did she get her taste, her fashions, her

manners? As she passed from sight towards the shadow of the woods, they

felt the poorer for her going; yet they were glad to have seen her, and

on second thoughts they felt that they could not justly ask more of

her than to have merely existed for a few hours in their presence. 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 promised a passage without change to Montreal,

stopped, and they were transferred to a smaller steamer with the

uncomfortable name of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirm and

dirty, and in every way bore out the character of a squalid Irish

goblin. Besides, she was already heavily laden with passengers, and,

with the addition of the other steamer's people had now double her

complement; and our friends doubted if they were not to pass the Rapids

in as much danger as discomfort. Their fellow-passengers were in great

variety, however, and thus partly atoned for their numbers. Among them

of course there was a full force of brides from Niagara and elsewhere,

and some curious forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared. It is

well enough, if she likes, and it may even be very noble for a passably

good-looking young lady to marry a gentleman of venerable age; but to

intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively caressing his wrinkled

front seems too reproachful of the general public; while, on the other

hand, if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlists in behalf of the

white-haired husband the unwilling sympathies of the spectator to see

her the centre of a group of young people, and him only acknowledged

from time to time by a Parthian snub. Nothing, however, could have been

more satisfactory than the sisterly surrounding of this latter bride.

They were of a better class of Irish people; and if it had been any

sacrifice for her to marry so old a man, they were doing their best to

give the affair at least the liveliness of a wake. There were five

or six of those great handsome girls, with their generous curves and

wholesome colors, and they were every one attended by a good-looking

colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly brogued voices,

and laughed with careless Celtic laughter. One of the young fellows

presently lost his hat overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief of

his lady about his head; and this appeared to be really one of the best

things in the world, and led to endless banter. They were well dressed,

and it could be imagined that the ancient bridegroom had come in for

the support of the whole good-looking, healthy, light-hearted family.

In some degree he looked it, and wore but a rueful countenance for a

bridegroom; so that a very young newly married couple, who sat next the

jolly sister-and-loverhood could not keep their pitying eyes off his

downcast face. “What if he, too, were young at heart!” the kind little

wife's regard seemed to say.

For the sake of the slight air that was stirring, and to have the best

view of the Rapids, the Banshee's whole company was gathered upon

the forward promenade, and the throng was almost as dense as in a

six-o'clock horse-car out from Boston. The standing and sitting groups

were closely packed together, and the expanded parasols and umbrellas

formed a nearly unbroken roof. Under this Isabel chatted at intervals

with the Ellisons, who sat near; but it was not an atmosphere that

provoked social feeling, and she was secretly glad when after a while

they shifted their position.

It was deadly hot, and most of the people saddened and silenced in

the heat. From time to time the clouds idling about overhead met and

sprinkled down a cruel little shower of rain that seemed to make the air

less breathable than before. The lonely shores were yellow with drought;

the islands grew wilder and barrener; the course of the river was for

miles at a stretch through country which gave no signs of human life.

The St. Lawrence has none of the bold picturesqueness of the Hudson, and

is far more like its far-off cousin the Mississippi. Its banks are low

like the Mississippi's, its current, swift, its way through solitary

lands. The same sentiment of early adventure hangs about each: both are

haunted by visions of the Jesuit in his priestly robe, and the soldier

in his mediaeval steel; the same gay, devout, and dauntless race has

touched them both with immortal romance. If the water were of a dusky

golden color, instead of translucent green, and the shores and islands

were covered with cottonwoods and willows instead of dark cedars, one

could with no great effort believe one's self on the Mississippi between

Cairo and St. Louis, so much do the great rivers strike one as kindred

in the chief features of their landscape. Only, in tracing this

resemblance you do not know just what to do with the purple mountains of

Vermont, seen vague against the horizon from the St. Lawrence, or with

the quaint little French villages that begin to show themselves as you

penetrate farther down into Lower Canada. These look so peaceful, with

their dormer-windowed cottages clustering about their church-spires,

that it seems impossible they could once have been the homes of the

savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand and scalping-knife

and tomahawk, harassed the borders of New England for a hundred years.

But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St.

Regis, in which was kindled the torch that wrapt Deerfield in flames,

waking her people from their sleep to meet instant death or taste the

bitterness of a captivity. The bell which was sent out from France for

the Indian converts of the Jesuits, and was captured by an English ship

and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it called

the Puritans to prayer, till at last it also summoned the priest-led

Indians and 'habitans' across hundreds of miles of winter and of

wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration,--this fateful bell still

hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and

vespers for nearly two centuries the children of those who fought so

pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it. Our friends would fair

have heard it as they passed, hoping for some mournful note of history

in its sound; but it hung silent over the silent hamlet, which, as it

lay in the hot afternoon sun by the river's side, seemed as lifeless as

the Deerfield burnt long ago.

They turned from it to look at a gentleman who had just appeared in a

mustard-colored linen duster, and Basil asked, “Shouldn't you like to

know the origin, personal history, and secret feelings of a gentleman

who goes about in a duster of that particular tint? Or, that gentleman

yonder with his eye tied up in a wet handkerchief, do you suppose he's

travelling for pleasure? Look at those young people from Omaha: they

haven't ceased flirting or cackling since we left Kingston. Do you

think everybody has such spirits out at Omaha? But behold a yet more

surprising figure than any we have yet seen among this boat-load of

nondescripts.”

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a face of somewhat foreign

cast, and well dressed, with a certain impressive difference from the

rest in the cut of his clothes. But what most drew the eye to him was

a large cross, set with brilliants, and surmounted by a heavy

double-headed eagle in gold. This ornament dazzled from a conspicuous

place on the left lappet of his coat; on his hand shone a magnificent

diamond ring, and he bore a stately opera-glass, with which, from time

to time, he imperiously, as one may say, surveyed the landscape. As

the imposing apparition grew upon Isabel, “O here,” she thought, “is

something truly distinguished. Of course, dear,” she added aloud to

Basil, “he's some foreign nobleman travelling here”; and she ran over in

her mind the newspaper announcements of patrician visitors from abroad

and tried to identify him with some one of them. The cross must be the

decoration of a foreign order, and Basil suggested that he was perhaps

a member of some legation at Washington, who had ran up there for his

summer vacation. The cross puzzled him, but the double-headed eagle, he

said, meant either Austria or Russia; probably Austria, for the wearer

looked a trifle too civilized for a Russian.

“Yes, indeed! What an air he has. Never tell me. Basil, that there's

nothing in blood!” cried Isabel, who was a bitter aristocrat at heart,

like all her sex, though in principle she was democratic enough. As

she spoke, the object of her regard looked about him on the different

groups, not with pride, not with hauteur, but with a glance of

unconscious, unmistakable superiority. “O, that stare!” she added;

“nothing but high birth and long descent can give it! Dearest, he's

becoming a great affliction to me. I want to know who he is. Couldn't

you 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's really dreadful. You

can easily see that's distinction,” she continued, as her hero moved

about the promenade and gently but loftily made a way for himself among

the other passengers and favored the scenery through his opera-glass

from one point and another. He spoke to no one, and she reasonably

supposed that he did not know English.

In the mean time it was drawing near the hour of dinner, but no dinner

appeared. Twelve, one, two came and went, and then at last came the

dinner, which had been delayed, it seemed, till the cook could recruit

his energies sufficiently to meet the wants of double the number he had

expected to provide for. It was observable of the officers and crew

of the Banshee, that while they did not hold themselves aloof from the

passengers in the disdainful American manner, they were of feeble mind,

and not only did everything very slowly (in the usual Canadian fashion),

but with an inefficiency that among us would have justified them in

being insolent. The people sat down at several successive tables to the

worst dinner that ever was cooked; the ladies first, and the gentlemen

afterwards, as they made conquest of places. At the second table, to

Basil's great satisfaction, he found a seat, and on his right hand the

distinguished foreigner.

“Naturally, I was somewhat abashed,” he said in the account he was

presently called to give Isabel of the interview, “but I remembered that

I was an American citizen, and tried to maintain a decent composure.

For several minutes we sat silent behind a dish of flabby cucumbers,

expecting the dinner, and I was wondering whether I should address him

in French or German,--for I knew you'd never forgive me if I let slip

such a chance,--when he turned and spoke himself.”

“O what did he say, dearest?”

He said, “Pretty tejious waitin,' ain't it? in she best New York State

accent.”

“You don't mean it!” gasped Isabel.

“But I do. After that I took courage to ask what his cross and

double-headed eagle meant. He showed the condescension of a true

nobleman. 'O,' says he, 'I'm glad you like it, and it's not the least

offense to ask,' and he told me. Can you imagine what it is? It's the

emblem of the 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! nothing 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 forward she saw the tossing and

flashing of surges that, to the eye, are certainly as threatening as the

rapids above Niagara. The steamer had already passed the Deplau and

the Galopes, and they had thus had a foretaste of whatever pleasure or

terror there is in the descent of these nine miles of stormy sea. It is

purely a matter of taste, about shooting the rapids of the St. Lawrence.

The passengers like it better than the captain and the pilot, to guesses

by their looks, and the women and children like it better than the men.

It is no doubt very thrilling and picturesque and wildly beautiful: the

children crow and laugh, the women shout forth their delight, as the

boat enters the seething current; great foaming waves strike her bows,

and brawl away to the stern, while she dips, and rolls, and shoots

onward, light as a bird blown by the wind; the wild shores and islands

whirl out of sight; you feel in every fibre the career of the vessel.

But the captain sits in front of the pilothouse smoking with a grave

face, the pilots tug hard at the wheel; the hoarse roar of the waters

fills the air; beneath the smoother sweeps of the current you can see

the brown rocks; as you sink from ledge to ledge in the writhing and

twisting steamer, you have a vague sense that all this is perhaps an

achievement rather than an enjoyment. When, descending the Long Sault,

you look back up hill, and behold those billows leaping down the

steep slope after you, “No doubt,” you confide to your soul, “it is

magnificent; but it is not pleasure.” You greet with silent satisfaction

the level river, stretching between the Long Sault and the Coteau,

and you admire the delightful tranquillity of that beautiful Lake St.

Francis into which it expands. Then the boat shudders into the Coteau

Rapids, and down through the Cedars and Cascades. On the rocks of the

last lies the skeleton of a steamer wrecked upon them, and gnawed at

still by the white-tusked wolfish rapids. No one, they say, was lost

from her. “But how,” Basil thought, “would it fare with all these people

packed here upon her bow, if the Banshee should swing round upon

a ledge?” As to Isabel, she looked upon the wrecked steamer with

indifference, as did all the women; but then they could not swim, and

would not have to save themselves. “The La Chine's to come yet,” they

exulted, “and that's the awfullest of all!”

They passed the Lake St. Louis; the La Chin; rapids flashed into sight.

The captain rose up from his seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and

waved a silence with it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “it's very

important in passing these rapids to keep the boat perfectly trim.

Please to remain just as you are.”

It was twilight, for the boat was late. From the Indian village on the

shore they signaled to know if he wanted the local pilot; the captain

refused; and then the steamer plunged into the leaping waves. From

rock to rock she swerved and sank; on the last ledge she scraped with a

deadly touch that went to the heart.

Then the danger was passed, and the noble city of Montreal was in full

sight, lying at the foot of her dark green mountain, and lifting her

many spires into the rosy twilight air: massive and grand showed the

sister towers of the French cathedral.

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

had meant to conjure up for Isabel's sake some reflex, however faint, of

that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has painted of Maisonneuve founding

and consecrating Montreal. He flushed with the recollection of the

historian's phrase; but in that moment there came forth from the cabin

a pretty young person who gave every token of being a pretty young

actress, even to the duenna-like, elderly female companion, to be

detected in the remote background of every young actress. She had

flirted audaciously during the day with some young Englishmen and

Canadians of her acquaintance, and after passing the La Chine Rapids she

had taken the hearts of all the men by springing suddenly to her feet,

apostrophizing the tumult with a charming attitude, and warbling a

delicious bit of song. Now as they drew near the city the Victoria

Bridge stretched its long tube athwart the river, and looked so 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 received 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!”

“'Three groans and a guggle,

And an awful struggle,

And over we go!'”

At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian looked very sheepish--for

a beaver; and all the other people laughed; but the noble historical

shades of Basil's thought vanished in wounded dignity beyond recall, and

left him feeling rather ashamed,--for he had laughed too.

VIII. THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.

The feeling of foreign travel for which our tourists had striven

throughout their journey, and which they had known in some degree at

Kingston and all the way down the river, was intensified from the first

moment in Montreal; and it was so welcome that they were almost glad to

lose money on their greenbacks, which the conductor of the omnibus would

take only at a discount of twenty cents. At breakfast next morning they

could hardly tell on what country they had fallen. The waiters had but a

thin varnish of English speech upon their native French, and they spoke

their own tongue with each other; but most of the meats were cooked to

the English taste, and the whole was a poor imitation of an American

hotel. During their stay the same commingling of usages and races

bewildered them; the shops were English and the clerks were commonly

French; the carriage-drivers were often Irish, and up and down

the streets with their pious old-fashioned names, tinkled American

horse-cars. Everywhere were churches and convents that recalled the

ecclesiastical and feudal origin of the city; the great tubular bridge,

the superb water-front with its long array of docks only surpassed

by those of Liverpool, the solid blocks of business houses, and the

substantial mansions on the quieter streets, proclaimed the succession

of Protestant thrift and energy.

Our friends cared far less for the modern splendor of Montreal than for

the remnants of its past, and for the features that identified it with

another faith and another people than their own. Isabel would almost

have confessed to any one of the black-robed priests upon the street;

Basil could easily have gone down upon his knees to the white-hooded,

pale-faced nuns gliding among the crowd. It was rapture to take a

carriage, and drive, not to the cemetery, not to the public library,

not to the rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association, or the grain

elevators, or the new park just tricked out with rockwork and sprigs of

evergreen,--not to any of the charming resorts of our own cities, but as

in Europe to the churches, the churches of a pitiless superstition,

the churches with their atrocious pictures and statues, their lingering

smell of the morning's incense, their confessionals, their fee-taking

sacristans, their worshippers dropped here and there upon their knees

about the aisles and saying their prayers with shut or wandering eyes

according as they were old women or young! I do not defend the feeble

sentimentality,--call it wickedness if you like,--but I understand it,

and I forgive it from my soul.

They went first, of course, to the French cathedral, pausing on their

way to alight and walk through the Bonsecours Market, where the habitans

have all come in their carts, with their various stores of poultry,

fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a study. Here is a

simple-faced young peasant-couple with butter and eggs and chickens

ravishingly displayed; here is a smooth-checked, blackeyed, black-haired

young girl, looking as if an infusion of Indian blood had darkened the

red of her cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions, potatoes, beets,

and turnips; there an old woman with a face carven like a walnut,

behind a flattering array of cherries and pears; yonder a whole family

trafficking in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar in many shapes of

pious and grotesque device. There are gay shows of bright scarfs and

kerchiefs and vari-colored yarns, and sad shows of old clothes and

second-hand merchandise of other sorts; but above all prevails the

abundance of orchard and garden, while within the fine edifice are the

stalls of the butchers, and in the basement below a world of household

utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware, and wooden-ware. As in other Latin

countries, each peasant has given a personal interest to his wares, but

the bargains are not clamored over as in Latin lands abroad. Whatever

protest and concession and invocation of the saints attend the

transacting 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 marble; but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been St. Peter's;

in fact it has something of the barnlike immensity and impressiveness of

St. Peter's. They did not ask it to be beautiful or grand; they desired

it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondly cherished hideousness

and incongruity of the average Catholic churches of their remembrance,

and it did this and more: it added an effect of its own; it offered

the spectacle of a swarthy old Indian kneeling before the high altar,

telling his beads, and saying with many sighs and tears the prayers

which it cost so much martyrdom and heroism to teach his race. “O, it is

only a savage man,” said the little French boy who was showing them

the place, impatient of their interest in a thing so unworthy as this

groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly about from object to object, rapidly

lecturing their inattention. “It is now time to go up into the tower,”

said he, and they gladly made that toilsome ascent, though it is

doubtful if the ascent of towers is not too much like the ascent

of mountains ever to be compensatory. From the top of Notre Dame is

certainly to be had a prospect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves

and trembling muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller might well

look with delight, and as it is must behold with wonder. So far as the

eye reaches it dwells only upon what is magnificent. All the features

of that landscape are grand. Below you spreads the city, which has less

that is merely mean in it than any other city of our continent, and

which is everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices, adorned by

tasteful churches, and skirted by full foliaged avenues of mansions and

villas. Behind it rises the beautiful mountain, green with woods and

gardens to its crest, and flanked on the east by an endless fertile

plain, and on the west by another expanse, through which the Ottawa

rushes, turbid and dark, to its confluence with the St. Lawrence. Then

these two mighty streams commingled flow past the city, lighting up

the vast Champaign country to the south, while upon the utmost southern

verge, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits of far-off mountains.

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur, their hearts were

humbled to the tacit admission that the colonial metropolis was not only

worthy of its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled

by any of the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic. Long before

they quitted Montreal they had rallied from this weakness, but they

delighted still to honor her superb beauty.

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those

who have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great

numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life, and the objects

of interest 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 from the many English sojourners by the effort

to look much more English than the latter. The social heart of the

colony clings fast to the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the

political tendency may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions

celebrate this affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those

whose lives were passed in the joint service of England and her loyal

child; and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the

sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud

reverence. Here, at least, was a people not cut off from its past, but

holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in

history. It gave a glamour of olden time to the new land; it touched

the prosaic democratic present with the waning poetic light of the

aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was here and there a title

on the tablets, and there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty

and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the dust. It is a

beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if you are so happy, you

are rather curtly told you may enter by a burly English figure in some

kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet precincts

you may feel yourself in England if you like,--which, for my part, I

do not. Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the Church of the

Jesuits, with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed

ceiling, its architectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its

black-eyed peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar, just as

in the enviably deplorable countries we all love; nor so much even as

the Irish cathedral which they next visited. That is a very gorgeous

cathedral indeed, painted and gilded 'a 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 representing Christ's progress to Calvary; and there was a very

tattered old man,--an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned

in whiskey, and who now spoke in a ghostly whisper,--who, when he saw

Basil's eye fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and

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, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to

the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind, those absurdly

sentimental people, whom yet I cannot find it in my heart to blame for

their folly, though I could name ever so many reasons for rebuking it.

Why, in fact, should we wish to find America like Europe? Are the ruins

and impostures and miseries and superstitions which beset the traveller

abroad so precious, that he should desire to imagine them at every step

in his own hemisphere? Or have we then of our own no effective shapes of

ignorance and want and incredibility, that we must forever seek an alien

contrast to our native intelligence and comfort? Some such questions

this guilty couple put to each other, and then drove off to visit the

convent of the Gray Nuns with a joyful expectation which I suppose the

prospect of the finest public-school exhibition in Boston could never

have inspired. But, indeed, since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not

well that there are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleasure in their

sad, pallid existence?

The convent is at a good distance from the Irish cathedral, and in going

to it the tourists made their driver carry them through one of the

few old French streets which still remain in Montreal. Fires and

improvements had made havoc among the quaint houses since Basil's

first visit; but at last they came upon a 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 martyrs (let us believe Lalement

or Brebeuf, who gave up their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada)

sifted their eyes in high-colored lithographs on the wall; among the

flower-pots in the dormer-window looking from every tin roof sat and

sewed a smooth haired young girl, I hope,--the romance of each little

mansion. The antique and foreign character of the place was accented by

the inscription upon a wall of “Sirop adoucissant de Madame Winslow.”

Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made 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-walled, cold-looking

chapel, with the usual paraphernalia of pictures and crucifixes. Seated

upon low benches on either side of the aisle were the curious or the

devout; the former in greater number and chiefly Americans, who were now

and then whispered silent by an old pauper zealous for the sanctity

of the place. At the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by two,

followed by the lady-superior with a prayerbook in her hand. She clapped

the leaves of this together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to

kneel again and rise, while they repeated in rather harsh voices their

prayers, and then clattered out of the chapel as they had clattered in,

with resounding shoes. The two young girls at the head were very pretty,

and all the pale faces had a corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their

pensive sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest girls might

very well be the twain that he had seen here so many years ago, stricken

forever young in their joyless beauty. The ungraceful gowns of coarse

gray, the blue checked aprons, the black crape caps, were the same; they

came and went with the same quick tread, touching their brows with holy

water and kneeling and rising now as then with the same constrained and

ordered movements. Would it be too cruel if they were really the same

persons? or would it be yet more cruel if every year two girls so young

and fair were 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 convent, the unnatural care of those alien little ones. Poor

'Soeurs Grises' in their narrow cells; at the bedside of sickness and

age and sorrow; kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the

bloody spectacle of the cross!--the power of your Church is shown far

more subtly and mightily in such as you, than in her grandest fanes or

the sight of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests, swinging

censers, tapers and pictures and images, under a gloomy heaven

of cathedral arches. There, indeed, the faithful have given their

substance; but here the nun has given up the most precious part of her

woman's nature, and all the tenderness that clings about the thought of

wife and mother.

“There are some things that always greatly afflict me in the idea of a

new country,” said Basil, as they loitered slowly through the grounds of

the convent toward the gate. “Of course, it's absurd to think of men as

other than men, as having changed their natures with their skies; but a

new land always does seem at first thoughts like a new chance afforded

the race for goodness and happiness, for health and life. So I grieve

for the earliest dead at Plymouth more than for the multitude that

the plague swept away in London; I shudder over the crime of the first

guilty man, the sin of the first wicked woman in a new country;

the trouble of the first youth or maiden crossed in love there is

intolerable. All should be hope and freedom and prosperous life upon

that virgin soil. It never was so since Eden; but none the less I

feel it ought to be; and I am oppressed by the thought that among the

earliest walls which rose upon this broad meadow of Montreal were those

built to immure the innocence of such young girls as these and shut them

from the life we find so fair. Wouldn't you like to know who was the

first that took the veil in this wild new country? Who was she, poor

soul, and what was her deep sorrow or lofty rapture? You can fancy her

some Indian maiden lured to the renunciation by the splendor of symbols

and promises seen vaguely through the lingering mists of her native

superstitions; or some weary soul, sick from the vanities and vices,

the bloodshed and the tears of the Old World, and eager for a silence

profounder than that of the wilderness into which she had fled. Well,

the Church knows and God. She was dust long ago.”

From time to time there had fallen little fitful showers during the

morning. Now as the wedding-journeyers passed out of the convent gate

the rain dropped soft and thin, and the gray clouds that floated through

the sky so swiftly were as far-seen Gray Sisters in flight for heaven.

“We shall have time for the drive round the mountain before dinner,”

said Basil, as they got into their carriage again; and he was giving the

order to the driver, when Isabel asked how far it was.

“Nine miles.”

“O, then we can't think of going with one horse. You know,” she

added, “that we always intended to have two horses for going round the

mountain.”

“No,” said Basil, not yet used to having his 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, yesterday,” interposed the

driver; “two ladies, real heavy apes, two gentlemen, weighin' two

hundred apiece, and a stout young man on the box with me. You'd 'a'

thought the horse was drawin' an empty carriage, the way she darted

along.”

“Then his horse must be perfectly worn out to-day,” said Isabel,

refusing to admit the pool fellow directly even to the honors of a

defeat. He had proved too much, and was put out of court with no hope of

repairing his error.

“Why, it seems a pity,” whispered Basil, dispassionately, “to turn this

man adrift, when he had a reasonable hope of being with us all day, and

has been so civil and obliging.”

“O yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do! Why don't you sentimentalize his

helpless, overworked horse?--all in a reek of perspiration.”

“Perspiration! Why, my dear, it's the rain!”

“Well, rain or shine, darling, I don't want to go round the mountain

with one horse; and it's very unkind of you to insist now, when you've

tacitly promised me all along to take two.”

“Now, this is a little too much, Isabel. You know we never mentioned the

matter till this 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 the hotel.”