ntered through the
village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, they
praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday character of the place,
enjoying equally the lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers
and their carriages to let, and the little shops, with nothing but
mementos of Niagara, and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery, to sell.
Shops so useless, they agreed, could not be found outside the Palms
Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world but
here. They felt themselves once more a part of the tide of mere
sight-seeing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in other days,
and in an eddy of which their love itself had opened its white blossom,
and lily-like dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of newly wedded bliss, which,
involving the whole land during the season of bridal-tours, may be said
to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of a
precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal couples,
and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien there, and
must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for his profane
eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any
sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses to the
collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside world to
which he belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and brides. Three or four
with the benediction still on them, come down in the same car with him;
he hands her travelling-shawl after one as she springs from the omnibus
into her husband's arms; there are two or three walking back and forth
with their new lords upon the porch of the hotel; at supper they are on
every side of him, and he feels himself suffused, as it were, by a
roseate atmosphere of youth and love and hope. At breakfast it is the
same, and then, in his wanderings about the place he constantly meets
them. They are of all manners of beauty, fair and dark, slender and
plump, tall and short; but they are all beautiful with the radiance of
loving and being loved. Now, if ever in their lives, they are charmingly
dressed, and ravishing toilets take the willing eye from the objects of
interest. How high the heels of the pretty boots, how small the tender.
tinted gloves, how electrical the flutter of the snowy skirts! What is
Niagara to these things?

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sisterhood to the