lf long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank
bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that
he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman
took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a
distinguished phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had
equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

"On your bridal tour, I presume," he continued, as they approached the
bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain,
middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward
festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. "Well, this is
my third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife 's been here once before on
the same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table
Rock with the others. Now that's all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move
on?" he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply,
by the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet
pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table next Basil's, and they
were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious
dining-hall.

"Well, Kitty," the married lady was saying, "you can tell the girls what
you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'll
believe anything sooner than the truth."

"O yes, indeed," said Kitty, "I've got a good deal of it made up
already. I'll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people
from all parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most.
I'm going to have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long
blond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he's got to
do duty in accounting for my missing glove. It'll never do to tell the
girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny,
I really can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners,
waited upon by their black servants."

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted
in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the
first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a
half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its
way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their
child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact
did not quite answer to the young lady's de