ood-morning," had passed away
from the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited by his widow,
who in turn was absent, and temporarily represented by their son.
The boy, in supplying Basil with an advertisement of the line, made
a specious show of haste, as if there were a long queue of tourists
waiting behind him to be served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed,
a spectral line there, but Basil was the only tourist present in the
flesh, and he shivered in his isolation, and fled with the advertisement
in his hand. Isabel met him at the door of the station with a frightened
face.

"Basil," she cried, "I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the
brides?"

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through
his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at
the news-man's booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the
Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from
Devonshire.

"My dear," he said, "there are no brides; everybody was married twelve
years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and
don't come to Niagara if they are wise."

"Yes," she desolately asserted, "that is so! Something has been hanging
over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the
absence of the brides. But--but--down at the hotels--Didn't you see
anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of
minstrelsy? Was there--"

She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat.

"Perhaps," said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella
for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting
in his remoter mind the probable consequences, "there were both brides
and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the
ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time,
and we live amid contemporary things. I daresay there were middle-aged
people at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them,
nor they us. I daresay that the place is now swarming with bridal
couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us
that it seems such a howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the
restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the reason why
they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their
loneliness. Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay your head
on my shoulder,