e, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the
centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, "Who's that
for, Basil?" demanded his wife; "the cook?" But seeing his ghastly
look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, "O you poor old tasteless
darling! You've got it for me!" and seemed about to die of laughter.

"Didn't you start and throw up your hands," he stammered, "when you came
to that case of fans?"

"Yes,--in horror! Did you think I liked the cruel things, with
their dead birds and their hideous colors? O Basil, dearest! You are
incorrigible. Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues
that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature? Now, my
love, just promise me one thing," she said pathetically. "We're going
to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhaps you'll be
wanting to surprise me with something there. Don't do it. Or if you
must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color of it's to
be; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there'll be some
taste about it, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased."

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something
about exchanging it. "No," she said, "we'll keep it as a--a--monument."
And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud
height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day.
So completely were their places changed, that he doubted if it were not
he who had made that scene on the Third Sister; and when Isabel said,
"O, why won't men use their reasoning faculties?" he could not for
himself have claimed any, and he could not urge the truth: that he had
bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty.
She would not let him get angry, and he could say nothing against the
half-ironical petting with which she soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning they
spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat
Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place on whose
wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first. They
had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled
at the greed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations. They
could not conceive why people should want to descend the inclined
railway to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at the idea of
going up Terrapin Tower; they der