had examined his head, and told him he had
equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

"On your bridal tour, I presume," he continued, as they approached the
bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain,
middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward
festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. "Well, this is my
third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife 's been here once before on the
same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table Rock
with the others. Now that's all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move on?"
he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply, by
the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet pleasing
associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table next Basil's, and they
were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious
dining-hall.

"Well, Kitty," the married lady was saying, you can tell the girls what
you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'll
believe anything sooner than the truth."

"O yes, indeed," said Kitty, "I've got a good deal of it made up already.
I'll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all
parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most. I'm going
to have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long blond
mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he's got to do duty
in accounting for my missing glove. It'll never do to tell the girls I
dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny, I really
can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon
by their black servants."

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted
in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the
first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a
half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its
way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their
child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact did
not quite answer to the young lady's description of it, and get it
certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of
bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he
used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to
find it so changed.

"Yes," he said, "I can't account