n before. Good heavens! To
think of our immortal souls being moved to mirth by such a thing as
this,--so stupid, so barren of all reason of laughter. And then the
cruelty of it! What ferocious imbeciles we are! Whom have I married? A
woman with neither heart nor brain!"

"O Basil, dear, pay him back the money-do."

"I can't. That's the worst of it. He 's money enough, and might justly
take offense. What breaks my heart is that we could have the depravity to
smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who supposed he had at
last met with an act of pure kindness. It's a thing to weep over. Look at
these grinning wretches! What a fiendish effect their smiles have,
through their cinders and sweat! O, it's the terrible weather; the
despotism of the dust and heat; the wickedness of the infernal air. What
a squalid and loathsome company!"

At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found themselves with several
hours' time on their hands before the train started for Niagara, and in
the first moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into saying, "Don't
you think we'd have done better to go directly from Rochester to the
Falls, instead of coming this way?"

"Why certainly. I didn't propose coming this way."

"I know it, dear. I was only asking," said Isabel, meekly. "But I should
think you'd have generosity enough to take a little of the blame, when I
wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you."

This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when
Basil made his first visit to Niagara, he had approached from the west by
way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existed
before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his
past, was resolved to draw near the great cataract by no other route.

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his
hard-heartedness. The sigh touched him, and he suggested a carriage-ride
through the city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had
been thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was
taken by surprise. "If ever we leave Boston," she said, "we will not live
at Rochester, as I thought last night; we'll come to Buffalo." She found
that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the
ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious freshness
breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at
last, with no line between sharper th