in mid-air like a filmy web,
scarce more passable than the rainbow that flings its arch above the
mists.

On the portico of the hotel they found half a score of gentlemen smoking,
and creating together that collective silence which passes for sociality
on our continent. Some carriages stood before the door, and within,
around the base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle call-boys. There were a
few trunks heaped together in one place, with a porter standing guard
over them; a solitary guest was buying a cigar at the newspaper stand in
one corner; another friendless creature was writing a letter in the
reading-room; the clerk, in a seersucker coat and a lavish shirt-bosom,
tried to give the whole an effect of watering-place gayety and bustle, as
he provided a newly arrived guest with a room.

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and repose with indifference.
If the hotel had been thronged with brilliant company, they would have
been no more and no less pleased; and when, after supper, they came into
the grand parlor, and found nothing there but a marble-topped centre.
table, with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small company of goblets,
they sat down perfectly content in a secluded window-seat. They were not
seen by the three people who entered soon after, and halted in the centre
of the room.

"Why, Kitty!" said one of the two ladies who must; be in any
travelling-party of three, "this is more inappropriate to your gorgeous
array than the supper-room, even."

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for social conquest, in some kind
of airy evening-dress, and was looking round with bewilderment upon that
forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a smile, that
she had not seen so much of the world yet as she had been promised; but
she liked Niagara very much, and perhaps they should find the world at
breakfast.

"No," said the other lady, who was as unquiet as Kitty was calm, and who
seemed resolved to make the most of the worst, "it isn't probable that
the hotel will fill up overnight; and I feel personally responsible for
this state of things. Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would be
so empty? I thought the place was thronged the whole summer long. How do
you account for it, Richard?"

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-continued discussion
elsewhere of the matter in hand, and he said that he had not been trying
to account for it.

"Then you don't care for Kitty's pleas