bearing the supper they
had ordered and set it smoking down.

Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon her face, and she let fall
her knife and fork. "You don't think, Basil," she faltered, "that they
could have found out we're a bridal party, and that they're serving us so
magnificently because--because--O, I shall be miserable every moment
we're here!" she concluded desperately.

She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a woman with so much broiled
white-fish on her plate, and such a banquet array about her; and her
husband made haste to reassure her. "You're still demoralized, Isabel, by
our sufferings at the Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings we
enjoy, though I should be sorry to undervalue them. I suspect it's the
custom to use people well at this hotel; or if we are singled out for
uncommon favor, I think: I can explain the cause. It has been discovered
by the register that we are from Boston, and we are merely meeting the
reverence, affection, and homage which the name everywhere commands!

"It 's our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and
moral virtue of Boston. This supper is not a tribute to you as a bride,
but as a Bostonian."

It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it served. It kindled
the local pride of Isabel to self-defense, and in the distraction of the
effort she forgot her fears; she returned with renewed appetite to the
supper, and in its excellence they both let fall their dispute,--which
ended, of course, in Basil's abject confession that Boston was the best
place in the world, and nothing but banishment could make him live
elsewhere,--and gave themselves up, as usual, to the delight of being
just what and where they were. At last, the natural course brought them
to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter approached from the corner
of the table at which he stood, to place the vase near them, he did not
retire at once, but presently asked if they were from the West.

Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were from the East.

He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if he went further, but
took heart, then, and asked, "Don't you think this is a pretty nice
hotel"--hastily adding as a concession of the probable existence of much
finer things at the East--"for a small hotel?"

They imagined this waiter as new to his station in life, as perhaps just
risen to it from some country tavern, and unable to repress his
exultation in wh