es
were left behind and the banks fell away in long upward sloping fields,
with farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visible in the generous
expanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawing his nets, and bending
from his boat, there near Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque immortal
attitudes of Raphael's Galilean fisherman; and now a flush mounted the
pale face of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the dawn there
came, more to the sight than any other sense, a vague menace of heat. But
as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil bathed his
weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion of the
scalded man, and how he was to fare that day. This poor wretch seemed of
another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the happy, and
Basil's pity was quite an abstraction; which, again, amused and shocked
him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little more
earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien creature here
and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to the disaster of
the night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft of her who so filled
his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security of sleep, Death
had passed them both so close that his presence might well have chilled
their dreams, as the iceberg that grazes the ship in the night freezes
all the air about it. But it was quite idle: where love was, life only
was; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden that he would have
laid upon them; his revery reflected with delicious caprice the looks,
the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore him far away from the
sad images that he had invited to mirror themselves in it.

IV. A DAY'S RAILROADING

Happiness has commonly a good appetite; and the thought of the
fortunately ended adventures of the night, the fresh morning air, and the
content of their own hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the boat
reached Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated with spirit
the question of breakfast and the best place of breakfasting in a city
which neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy way.

They decided at last, in view of the early departure of the train, and
the probability that they would be more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast
at the station, and thither they went and took places at one of the many
tables within, where they seemed to have been expected only by the flies