usly in such
different times and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity.
The contrasts were sharp: each group had its travesty in some other; the
talk of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next;
but of all these parodies none was so terribly effective as the two
women, who sat in the midst of the company, yet were somehow distinct
from the rest. One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other was
dressed in bridal white, and they were both alike awful in their mockery
of guiltless sorrow and guiltless joy. They were not old, but the soul
of youth was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruin ancient as
sin looked from their eyes; their talk and laughter seemed the echo of
an innumerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land
and time, each solitary forever, yet all bound together in the unity of
an imperishable slavery and shame.

What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters! Let us be glad the night
drops her curtain upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the
other actors from our view.

Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there
were numbers of people lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes
of talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were others reading
"Lothair," a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very
fashionable book indeed. There was in the air that odor of paint and
carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of the chandeliers
ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her
respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious
feeling of coziness and security to our travellers.

A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot's
bell signaling the engineer to slow the boat. There was a moment of
perfect silence; then all the drops of the chandeliers in the saloon
clashed musically together; then fell another silence; and at last came
wild cries for help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses.
"Send out a boat!" "There was a woman aboard that steamboat!" "Lower
your boats!" "Run a craft right down, with your big boat!" "Send out a
boat and pick up the crew!" The cries rose and sank, and finally ceased;
through the lattice of the state-room window some lights shone faintly
on the water at a distance.

"Wait here, Isabel!" said her husband. "We've run down a boat. We don't
seem hurt; but I'll go see. I'll be back in a