scalded here!" And a burden was
carried by from which fluttered, with its terrible regularity, that
utterance of mortal anguish.

Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the
morning come.

The boat swiftly ascended the current, and presently the steeper shores
were left behind and the banks fell away in long upward sloping fields,
with farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visible in the
generous expanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawing his nets,
and bending from his boat, there near Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque
immortal attitudes of Raphael's Galilean fisherman; and now a flush
mounted the pale face of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the
dawn there came, more to the sight than any other sense, a vague menace
of heat. But as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil
bathed his weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion
of the scalded man, and how he was to fare that day. This poor wretch
seemed of another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the
happy, and Basil's pity was quite an abstraction; which, again, amused
and shocked him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a
little more earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien
creature here and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to
the disaster of the night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft of her
who so filled his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security
of sleep, Death had passed them both so close that his presence might
well have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg that grazes the ship in
the night freezes all the air about it. But it was quite idle: where
love was, life only was; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden
that he would have laid upon them; his revery reflected with delicious
caprice the looks, the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore him
far away from the sad images that he had invited to mirror themselves in
it.

IV. A DAY'S RAILROADING

Happiness has commonly a good appetite; and the thought of the
fortunately ended adventures of the night, the fresh morning air, and
the content of their own hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the
boat reached Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated with
spirit the question of breakfast and the best place of breakfasting in
a city which neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy
way.

T