down between their heavily
wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the
sight; and then, looking back from the shore to the spot where they had
stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess itself of all,
and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air like a filmy web,
scarce more passable than the rainbow that flings its arch above the
mists.

On the portico of the hotel they found half a score of gentlemen
smoking, and creating together that collective silence which passes for
sociality on our continent. Some carriages stood before the door, and
within, around the base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle call-boys.
There were a few trunks heaped together in one place, with a porter
standing guard over them; a solitary guest was buying a cigar at the
newspaper stand in one corner; another friendless creature was writing a
letter in the reading-room; the clerk, in a seersucker coat and a lavish
shirt-bosom, tried to give the whole an effect of watering-place gayety
and bustle, as he provided a newly arrived guest with a room.

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and repose with indifference.
If the hotel had been thronged with brilliant company, they would have
been no more and no less pleased; and when, after supper, they came into
the grand parlor, and found nothing there but a marble-topped centre.
table, with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small company of goblets,
they sat down perfectly content in a secluded window-seat. They were
not seen by the three people who entered soon after, and halted in the
centre of the room.

"Why, Kitty!" said one of the two ladies who must; be in any
travelling-party of three, "this is more inappropriate to your gorgeous
array than the supper-room, even."

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for social conquest, in some kind
of airy evening-dress, and was looking round with bewilderment upon that
forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a smile, that
she had not seen so much of the world yet as she had been promised; but
she liked Niagara very much, and perhaps they should find the world at
breakfast.

"No," said the other lady, who was as unquiet as Kitty was calm, and who
seemed resolved to make the most of the worst, "it isn't probable that
the hotel will fill up overnight; and I feel personally responsible for
this state of things. Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would be
so empty