think it needs any help from me," replied the young girl, as if
the tone of her companion had patronized and piqued her. She turned as
she spoke and looked up the sad, lonely river. The moon was making its
veiled face seen through the gray heaven, and touching the black stream
with hints of melancholy light. On either hand the uninhabitable shore
rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin
covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening
into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. The cry of
some wild bird struck through the silence of which the noise of the
steamer had grown to be a part, and echoed away to nothing. Then from
the saloon there came on a sudden the notes of a song; and Miss Ellison
led the way within, where most of the other passengers were grouped
about the piano. The English girl with the corn-colored hair sat, in
ravishing picture, at the instrument, and the commonish man and his very
plain wife were singing with heavenly sweetness together.

"Isn't it beautiful!" said Miss Ellison. "How nice it must be to be able
to do such things!"

"Yes? do you think so? It's rather public," answered her companion.

When the English people had ended, a grave, elderly Canadian gentleman
sat down to give what he believed a comic song, and sent everybody
disconsolate to bed.

"Well, Kitty?" cried Mrs. Ellison, shutting herself inside the young
lady's state-room a moment.

"Well, Fanny?"

"Isn't he handsome?"

"He is, indeed."

"Is he nice?"

"I don't know."

"Sweet?"

"_Ice_-cream," said Kitty, and placidly let herself be kissed an
enthusiastic good-night. Before Mrs. Ellison slept she wished to ask her
husband one question.

"What is it?"

"Should you want Kitty to marry a Bostonian? They say Bostonians are so
cold."

"What Bostonian has been asking Kitty to marry him?"

"O, how spiteful you are! I didn't say any had. But if there should?"

"Then it'll be time to think about it. You've married Kitty right and
left to everybody who's looked at her since we left Niagara, and I've
worried myself to death investigating the character of her husbands. Now
I'm not going to do it any longer,--till she has an offer."

"Very well. _You_ can depreciate your own cousin, if you like. But I
know what _I_ shall do. I shall let her wear all my best things. How
fortunate it is, Richard, that we're exactly of a size! O, I am so glad
we brought Kitty alo