t, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and
Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists
dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe
and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal
couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could
transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised
their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the
tradition of its awful power; only they refused their cheap and selfish
compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years in its
conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This
public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life,
and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to
that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai
Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the
Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to
rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of the new
temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands
every year. The shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a
deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they
met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the
hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should also abound in
them; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of
interest and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing
arms and their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean
upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and
Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the
island, and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran
smooth before breaking into the rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature
in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far
from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground of every famous
American landscape; and when I think of the amount of public love-making
in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite,
and from the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our
continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth
century is the golden age, and that we want very little of be