“If your thoughts have that direction,” answered her husband, “we had better go back to the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow morning.  It’s late for it to-day, at any rate.”  He had treated Isabel since the adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse.

“I’m not afraid,” she sighed, “but in the words of the retreating soldier, I—­I’m awfully demoralized;” and added, “You know we must reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this evening.”

Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to

Boston by way of Montreal and Quebec, and it was part of their pleasure to get these of the heartiest imaginable ticket-agent.  He was a colonel or at least a major, and he made a polite feint of calling Basil by some military title.  He commended the trip they were about to make as the most magnificent and beautiful on the whole continent, and he commended them for intending to make it.  He said that was Mrs. General Bowdur of Philadelphia who just went out; did they know her?  Somehow, the titles affected Basil as of older date than the late war, and as belonging to the militia period; and he imagined for the agent the romance of a life spent at a watering-place, in contact with rich money-spending, pleasure-taking people, who formed his whole jovial world.  The Colonel, who included them in this world, and thereby brevetted them rich and fashionable, could not secure a state-room for them on the boat,—­a perfectly splendid Lake steamer, which would take them down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change,—­but he would give them a letter to the captain, who was a very particular friend of his, and would be happy to show them as his friends every attention; and so he wrote a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all reason making him feel for the moment that he was privileged by a document which was no doubt part of every such transaction.  He spoke in a loud cheerful voice; he laughed jollily at no apparent joke; he bowed very low and said, “Good-evening!” at parting, and they went away as if he had blessed them.

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixture of quaintness and commonplaceness; in hanging about the shop-Windows with their monotonous variety of feather fans,—­each with a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre,—­moccasons, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the neighboring squaws can invent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricing many things, and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological