st night; we'll come to Buffalo." She
found that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without
the ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious
freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into
the sky at last, with no line between sharper than that which divides
drowsing from dreaming. But the color was the most charming thing,
that delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of the sea-blue, but
infinitely softer and lovelier. The nearer expanses rippled with dainty
waves, silver and lucent; the further levels made, with the sun-dimmed
summer sky, a vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the white
sails of ships, and stained by the smoke of steamers.

"Take me away now," said Isabel, when her eyes had feasted upon all
this, "and don't let me see another thing till I get to Niagara. Nothing
less sublime is worthy the eyes that have beheld such beauty."

However, on the way to Niagara she consented to glimpses of the river
which carries the waters of the lake for their mighty plunge, and
which shows itself very nobly from time to time as you draw toward the
cataract, with wooded or cultivated islands, and rich farms along its
low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye the shining white of the
rapids,--a hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness to be revealed.

VI. NIAGARA.

As the train stopped, Isabel's heart beat with a child-like exultation,
as I believe every one's heart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara.
She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, that she heard the roar
of the cataract, and now, when she alighted from the car, she was sure
she should have heard it but for the vulgar little noises that attend
the arrival of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere else. "Never
mind, dearest; you shall be stunned with it before you leave," promised
her husband; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode through the
quaint streets of the village, where it remains a question whether the
lowliness of the shops and private houses makes the hotels look so vast,
or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings. The immense
caravansaries swelling up from among the little bazaars (where they
sell feather fans, and miniature bark canoes, and jars and vases and
bracelets and brooches carved out of the local rocks), made our
friends with their trunks very conscious of their disproportion to the
accommodations of the smallest. They wer