et her taste, her fashions, her
manners? As she passed from sight towards the shadow of the woods, they
felt the poorer for her going; yet they were glad to have seen her, and
on second thoughts they felt that they could not justly ask more of
her than to have merely existed for a few hours in their presence. They
perceived that beauty was not only its own excuse for being, but that it
flattered and favored and profited the world by consenting to be.

At Prescott, the boat on which they had come from Charlotte, and on
which they had been promised a passage without change to Montreal,
stopped, and they were transferred to a smaller steamer with the
uncomfortable name of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirm and
dirty, and in every way bore out the character of a squalid Irish
goblin. Besides, she was already heavily laden with passengers, and,
with the addition of the other steamer's people had now double her
complement; and our friends doubted if they were not to pass the Rapids
in as much danger as discomfort. Their fellow-passengers were in great
variety, however, and thus partly atoned for their numbers. Among them
of course there was a full force of brides from Niagara and elsewhere,
and some curious forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared. It is
well enough, if she likes, and it may even be very noble for a passably
good-looking young lady to marry a gentleman of venerable age; but to
intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively caressing his wrinkled
front seems too reproachful of the general public; while, on the other
hand, if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlists in behalf of the
white-haired husband the unwilling sympathies of the spectator to see
her the centre of a group of young people, and him only acknowledged
from time to time by a Parthian snub. Nothing, however, could have been
more satisfactory than the sisterly surrounding of this latter bride.
They were of a better class of Irish people; and if it had been any
sacrifice for her to marry so old a man, they were doing their best to
give the affair at least the liveliness of a wake. There were five
or six of those great handsome girls, with their generous curves and
wholesome colors, and they were every one attended by a good-looking
colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly brogued voices,
and laughed with careless Celtic laughter. One of the young fellows
presently lost his hat overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief