he woman of his choice, and made no answer. But to his own
soul he said: "I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance.
It seems I have been flattering myself."

The next morning they went out as they had planned, for an exploration
of Goat Island, after an early breakfast. As they sauntered through
the village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, they
praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday character of the place,
enjoying equally the lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers
and their carriages to let, and the little shops, with nothing but
mementos of Niagara, and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery, to sell.
Shops so useless, they agreed, could not be found outside the Palms
Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world
but here. They felt themselves once more a part of the tide of mere
sight-seeing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in other days,
and in an eddy of which their love itself had opened its white blossom,
and lily-like dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of newly wedded bliss,
which, involving the whole land during the season of bridal-tours, may
be said to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel
of a precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal
couples, and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien
there, and must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for
his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man
of any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses
to the collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside
world to which he belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and brides. Three
or four with the benediction still on them, come down in the same car
with him; he hands her travelling-shawl after one as she springs from
the omnibus into her husband's arms; there are two or three walking back
and forth with their new lords upon the porch of the hotel; at supper
they are on every side of him, and he feels himself suffused, as it
were, by a roseate atmosphere of youth and love and hope. At breakfast
it is the same, and then, in his wanderings about the place he
constantly meets them. They are of all manners of beauty, fair and dark,
slender and plump, tall and short; but they are all beautiful with the
radiance of loving and being loved. Now, if ever in their lives, they
are charmingly dr