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