formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heat of the gas-lights and the persistence of the mosquitoes.  There were very few people besides themselves in the shops, and Isabel’s purchases were not lavish.  Her husband had made up his mind to get her some little keepsake; and when he had taken her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops, and hastily bought her a feather fan,—­a magnificent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre.  When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, “Who’s that for, Basil?” demanded his wife; “the cook?” But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, “O you poor old tasteless darling!  You’ve got it for me!” and seemed about to die of laughter.

“Didn’t you start and throw up your hands,” he stammered, “when you came to that case of fans?”

“Yes,—­in horror!  Did you think I liked the cruel things, with their dead birds and their hideous colors?  O Basil, dearest!  You are incorrigible.  Can’t you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature?  Now, my love, just promise me one thing,” she said pathetically.  “We’re going to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhaps you’ll be wanting to surprise me with something there.  Don’t do it.  Or if you must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color of it’s to be; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there’ll be some taste about it, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased.”

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something about exchanging it.  “No,” she said, “we’ll keep it as a—­a—­monument.”  And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day.  So completely were their places changed, that he doubted if it were not he who had made that scene on the Third Sister; and when Isabel said, “O, why won’t men use their reasoning faculties?” he could not for himself have claimed any, and he could not urge the truth:  that he had bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty.  She would not let him get angry, and he could say nothing against the half-ironical petting with which she soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning they spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place on whose wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first.  They had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled at the greed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations.  They could not conceive why people should want to descend the inclined railway to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at the idea of going up Terrapin Tower; they derided the vulgar daring of those who went out upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw about to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had no words to express their contempt.