he common enjoyment was to
venture as near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into
the water, and to make as if to throw them over precipices on the people
below; to pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous
mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage
waiting a good five minutes, while he could cut his initials on a
band-rail. "You can come back and see 'em on your bridal tower," said
the driver. Isabel gave a little start, as if she had almost thought of
something she was trying to think of.

They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered
a couple making a tour of the island on foot. But none of these people
were young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited
only by persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating
lunch to the music of the shouting Rapids, on the outer edge of the last
Sister, were no younger, apparently.

Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she
preferred to refute his story of her former panic on those islands by
remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb
novelty which nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in
that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock has fallen
and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from
below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and
points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves
of a perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in
celebrating the display, with the purpose of rendering her loss more
poignant; but she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather
keep her Niagara unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood
him, there must be something rather cheap and conscious in the new
feature. She approved, however, of the change that had removed that
foolish little Terrapin Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she
confessed that she could have enjoyed a little variety in the stories
the driver told them of the Indian burial-ground on the island: they
were exactly the stories she and Basil had heard twelve years before,
and the ill-starred goats, from which the island took its name, perished
once more in his narrative.

Under the influence of his romances our travelers began to find the
whole scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little
sooner than they had