icially to announce the marriage of the Prince of Wales--"Lord Lyons,
go thou and do likewise;" and he looked at Forbes when he told it, which
made Miss Lamont blush, and appear what the artist had described her
to King--the sweetest thing in life. Mrs. Benson beamed with motherly
content, and was quite as tearful as ungrammatical, but her mind was
practical and forecasting. "There'll have to be," she confided to Miss
Lamont, "more curtains in the parlor, and I don't know but new paper."
Mr. Meigs was not present. Mrs. Farquhar noticed this, and Mrs. Benson
remembered that he had said something about going down to North Conway,
which gave King an opportunity to say to Mrs. Farquhar that she ought
not to despair, for Mr. Meigs evidently moved in a circle, and was
certain to cross her path again. "I trust so," she replied. "I've been
his only friend through all this miserable business." The dinner was not
a great success. There was too much self-consciousness all round, and
nobody was witty and brilliant.

The next morning King took Irene to the Crystal Cascade. When he used
to frequent this pretty spot as a college boy, it had seemed to him the
ideal place for a love scene-much better than the steps of a hotel.
He said as much when they were seated at the foot of the fall. It is a
charming cascade fed by the water that comes down Tuckerman's Ravine.
But more beautiful than the fall is the stream itself, foaming down
through the bowlders, or lying in deep limpid pools which reflect the
sky and the forest. The water is as cold as ice and as clear as cut
glass; few mountain streams in the world, probably, are so absolutely
without color. "I followed it up once," King was saying, by way of
filling in the pauses with personal revelations, "to the source. The
woods on the side are dense and impenetrable, and the only way was to
keep in the stream and climb over the bowlders. There are innumerable
slides and cascades and pretty falls, and a thousand beauties and
surprises. I finally came to a marsh, a thicket of alders, and around
this the mountain closed in an amphitheatre of naked perpendicular rock
a thousand feet high. I made my way along the stream through the
thicket till I came to a great bank and arch of snow--it was the last of
July--from under which the stream flowed. Water dripped in many little
rivulets down the face of the precipices--after a rain there are said to
be a thousand cascades there. I determined to climb