their troubling bags and packages; they
complimented the ridiculous princeliness of their stateroom, and then
they betook themselves to the sheltered space aft of the saloon, where
they sat down for the tranquiller observance of the wharf and whatever
should come to be seen by them. Like all people who have just escaped
with their lives from some menacing calamity, they were very
philosophical in spirit; and having got aboard of their own motion,
and being neither of them apparently the worse for the ordeal they had
passed through, were of a light, conversational temper.

"What an amusingly superb affair!" Basil cried as they glanced through
an open window down the long vista of the saloon. "Good heavens!
Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain republicans to Albany in
comfort and safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise?
Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter," he added. "I am
spoiled for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour; I am a
ruinous spendthrift, and a humble three-story swell-front up at the
South End is no longer the place for me. Dearest,

'Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,'

never to leave this Aladdin's-palace-like steamboat, but spend our
lives in perpetual trips up and down the Hudson."

To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly
sketched the life they could lead aboard. Since they could not help
it, they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval
between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our
democratic menage to the taste of the richest and most extravagant
plebeian amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as
little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a
sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecile who will have lace
curtains to the steamboat berth into which he gets with his pantaloons
on, and out of which he may be blown by an exploding boiler at any
moment; it is he who will have for supper that overgrown and shapeless
dinner in the lower saloon, and will not let any one else buy tea or
toast for a less sum than he pays for his surfeit; it is he who
perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and the reluctance of the
waiters; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with his
womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel
sit. Personally, he is not so bad; he is good-looking, like all of us;
he is better drest tha