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 ceas