ld, after
the fashion of middle-aged hotel clerks, but he parts his hair very much
on one side, and brushes it squarely across his forehead to hide his
loss; the forefinger that he touches that little snapbell with, when he
doesn't look at you, must be very pudgy now. Come, let us get out and
breakfast at, Rochester; they will give us broiled whitefish; and we can
show the children where Sam Patch jumped over Genesee Falls, and--"

"No, no, Basil," cried his wife. "It would be sacrilege! All that is
sacred to those dear young days of ours; and I wouldn't think of trying
to repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that dining-room to
reproach us for our intrusion! Oh, perhaps we have done a wicked thing
in coming this journey! We ought to have left the past alone; we shall
only mar our memories of all these beautiful places. Do you suppose
Buffalo can be as poetical as it was then? Buffalo! The name does n't
invite the Muse very much. Perhaps it never was very poetical! Oh,
Basil, dear, I'm afraid we have only come to find out that we were
mistaken about everything! Let's leave Rochester alone, at any rate!"

"I'm not troubled! We won't disturb our dream of Rochester; but I don't
despair of Buffalo. I'm sure that Buffalo will be all that our fancy
ever painted it. I believe in Buffalo."

"Well, well," murmured Isabel, "I hope you're right;" and she put some
things together for leaving their car at Buffalo, while they were still
two hours away.

When they reached a place where the land mated its level with the level
of the lake, they ran into a wilderness of railroad cars, in a world
where life seemed to be operated solely by locomotives and their
helpless minions. The bellowing and bleating trains were arriving in
every direction, not only along the ground floor of the plain, but
stately stretches of trestle-work, which curved and extended across the
plain, carried them to and fro overhead. The travelers owned that this
railroad suburb had its own impressiveness, and they said that the
trestle-work was as noble in effect as the lines of aqueduct that stalk
across the Roman Campagna. Perhaps this was because they had not seen
the Campagna or its aqueducts for a great while; but they were so glad
to find themselves in the spirit of their former journey again that they
were amiable to everything. When the children first caught sight of the
lake's delicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelier than the sea,
they fe