oment in the shade outside, "whether we had better walk
up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage
there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer,
with half the exertion. By this route we shall have sights end smells
which the other can't offer us, but whichever we take we shall be
sorry."

"Then I say take this," decided Isabel. "I want to be sorry upon the
easiest possible terms, this weather."

They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well for them
both if she could have exercised this philosophy with regard to the
whole day's business, or if she could have given up her plans for it,
with the same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat!
It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true
wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant
to do. It matters very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or
of business, we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The
mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one
may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have
scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure.
We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction;
the gentle sin of omission is all but blotted from the calendar of
our crimes. If I had been Columbus, I should have thought twice before
setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock,
I should have sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens,
Starvation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as
ever I came in sight of their granite perch should have turned back to
England. But it is now too late to repair these errors, and so, on one
of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdurate bridal pair, in a
Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment
of a series of intentions, any of which had wiselier been left
unaccomplished. Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in
Fiftieth Street, and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming and staging
and variously cooling and calming by the way, until they reached
the ticket-office on Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake
themselves to the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She
felt that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions
already on this journey, and she was reso