ud, as they
wandered on, "and all strange cities are enchanted. What is Rochester
to the Rochesterese? A place of a hundred thousand people, as we read
in our guide, an immense flour interest, a great railroad entrepot, an
unrivaled nursery trade, a university, two commercial colleges, three
collegiate institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I
dare say any respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing
over his city. But Rochester is for us, who don't know it at all, a
city of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over
piano-fortes, of a palatial hotel with pastoral waiters and porter,--a
city of handsome streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of the
golden age. The only definite association with it in our minds is the
tragically romantic thought that here Sam Patch met his fate."

"And who in the world was Sam Patch?

"Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud
of distresses me. Have you really, then, never heard of the man who
invented the saying, 'Some things can be done as well as others,'
and proved it by jumping over Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this
belief, he attempted the leap of the Genesee Falls. The leap was easy
enough, but the coming up again was another matter. He failed in that.
It was the one thing that could not be done as well as others."

"Dreadful!" said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. "But what
has all that to do with Rochester?"

"Now, my dear, You don't mean to say you didn't know that the Genesee
Falls were at Rochester? Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we're within
ten minutes' walk of them now."

"Then walk to them at once!" cried Isabel, wholly unabashed, and in fact
unable to see what he had to be ashamed of. "Actually, I believe you
would have allowed me to leave Rochester without telling me the falls
were here, if you hadn't happened to think of Sam Patch."

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief object of their journey
had been to visit the scene of Sam Patch's fatal exploit, and she drew
Basil with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroad station,
beyond which he said were the falls. Presently, after threading their
way among a multitude of locomotives, with and without trains attached,
that backed and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatiently on every
side, they passed through the station to a broad planking above
the river on the other side, and thence, after e