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,--moccasons, 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!"