held the ever-varying effect of that
constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or rather of people
whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new
from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this
illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with
evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a
wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness of
pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three
little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out
into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges connect them
now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge
rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The
Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled
woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination
of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded
from exploring them. It wants no courage to do this, but merely
submission to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward
than the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no
human being had perhaps set foot. She grossed from bridge to bridge with
a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence,
through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the
heaving and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which at every
instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told
heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil another
revelation of character. Without the slightest warning she sank down at
the root of a tree, and said, with serious composure, that she could
never go back on those bridges; they were not safe. He stared at her
cowering form in blank amaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Then it
occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and he said,
"Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat."

"O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!" implored Isabel. "You see
yourself the Midges are not safe. Do get a boat."

"Or a balloon," he suggested, humoring the pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his knees at her side, and
took her hands in his. "Isabel! Isabel! Are you crazy?" he cried, as if
he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered in reply; he said,
to men