o be Their Wedding Journey?"

XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Life had not used them ill in this time, and the fairish treatment they
had received was not wholly unmerited. The twelve years past had made
them older, as the years must in passing. Basil was now forty-two, and
his moustache was well sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, and
the parting of her hair had thinned and retreated; but she managed to
give it an effect of youthful abundance by combing it low down upon her
forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush. By gaslight she was
still very pretty; she believed that she looked more interesting, and
she thought Basil's gray moustache distinguished. He had grown stouter;
he filled his double-breasted frock coat compactly, and from time to
time he had the buttons set forward; his hands were rounded up on the
backs, and he no longer wore his old number of gloves by two sizes; no
amount of powder or manipulation from the young lady in the shop would
induce them to go on. But this did not matter much now, for he seldom
wore gloves at all. He was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare
in that direction, for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully after
the out-goes. The insurance business was not what it had been, and
though Basil had comfortably established himself in it, he had not made
money. He sometimes thought that he might have done quite as well if he
had gone into literature; but it was now too late. They had not a very
large family: they had a boy of eleven, who took after his father, and a
girl of nine, who took after the boy; but with the American feeling
that their children must have the best of everything, they made it an
expensive family, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.

The narrowness of their means, as well as their household cares, had
kept them from taking many long journeys. They passed their winters in
Boston, and their summers on the South Shore, cheaper than the North
Shore, and near enough for Basil to go up and down every day for
business; but they promised themselves that some day they would revisit
certain points on their wedding journey, and perhaps somewhere find
their lost second-youth on the track. It was not that they cared to be
young, but they wished the children to see them as they used to be when
they thought themselves very old; and one lovely afternoon in June they
started for Niagara.

It had been very hot fo