while he could cut his initials on a band-rail. "You can come
back and see 'em on your bridal tower," said the driver. Isabel gave a
little start, as if she had almost thought of something she was trying to
think of.

They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered a
couple making a tour of the island on foot. But none of these people were
young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited only by
persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating lunch to
the music of the shouting Rapids, on the outer edge of the last Sister,
were no younger, apparently.

Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she
preferred to refute his story of her former panic on those islands by
remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb
novelty which nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in
that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock has fallen
and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from
below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and
points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a
perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in celebrating
the display, with the purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but
she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather keep her Niagara
unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood him, there must be
something rather cheap and conscious in the new feature. She approved,
however, of the change that had removed that foolish little Terrapin
Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she confessed that she could
have enjoyed a little variety in the stories the driver told them of the
Indian burial-ground on the island: they were exactly the stories she and
Basil had heard twelve years before, and the ill-starred goats, from
which the island took its name, perished once more in his narrative.

Under the influence of his romances our travelers began to find the whole
scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little sooner than
they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous village on
foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of
the local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world so
large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill
them? They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt;