n hands
all round with the waiters, chambermaids, and porters of the hotel. The
young fellow with the bad amiable face came in a calash, and refused to
overpay the driver with a gay decision that made him Basil's envy till
he saw his tribulation in getting the troupe's luggage checked. There
were forty pieces, and it always remained a mystery, considering the
small amount of clothing necessary to those people on the stage, what
could have filled their trunks. The young man and the two English
blondes of American birth found places in the same car with our
tourists, and enlivened the journey with their frolics. When the young
man pretended to fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head in
a shawl, and vexed him with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a
brief truce with a handful of almonds; and the ladies having no other
way to eat them, one of them saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked
them hammerwise with the heel. It was all so pleasant that it ought to
have been all right; and in their merry world of outlawry perhaps things
are not so bad as we like to think them.

The country into which the train plunges as soon as Quebec is out of
sight is very stupidly savage, and our friends had little else to do
but to watch the gambols of the players, till they came to the river St.
Francis, whose wandering loveliness the road follows through an infinite
series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and finds everywhere glassing
in its smooth current the elms and willows of its gentle shores. At
one place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge saw
mill, covering the stream with logs and refuse, and the banks with whole
cities of lumber; which also they accepted as no mean elements of the
picturesque. They clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant
life they were leaving. When some French boys came aboard with wild
raspberries to sell in little birch-bark canoes, they thrilled with
pleasure, and bought them, but sighed then, and said, "What thing
characteristic of the local life will they sell us in Maine when we
get there? A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the
squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising the
new Dollar Store in Portland?" They saw the quaintness vanish from the
farm-houses; first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep
roof, then the steep roof itself. By and by they came to a store with a
Grecian portico and four square pine p