They had an early dinner, and looked their last upon the nuptial gayety of the otherwise forlorn hotel.  Three brides sat down with them in travelling-dress; two occupied the parlor as they passed out; half a dozen happy pairs arrived (to the music of the band) in the omnibus that was to carry our friends back to the station; they caught sight of several about the shop windows, as that drove through the streets.  Thus the place perpetually renews itself in the glow of love as long as the summer lasts.  The moon which is elsewhere so often of wormwood, or of the ordinary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from the first of June to the last of October; and this is a great charm in Niagara.  I think with tenderness of all the lives that have opened so fairly there; the hopes that have reigned in the glad young hearts; the measureless tide of joy that ebbs and flows with the arriving and departing trains.  Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and of fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak:  but here only youth, faith, rapture.  I kiss my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I were a poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towards the weak sisterhood of evident brides, and both our friends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara at the last moment.  I do not know how much of their content was due to the fact that they had suffered no sort of wrong there, from those who are apt to prey upon travellers.  In the hotel a placard warned them to have nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen on the streets, but always to order their carriage at the office; on the street the hackmen whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant drivers in league with the landlords; yet their actual experience was great reasonableness and facile contentment with the sum agreed upon.

This may have been because the hackmen so far outnumbered the visitors, that the latter could dictate terms; but they chose to believe it a triumph of civilization; and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their faith.  Only at the station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt, by the hotel porter who professed to find Basil’s trunk enfeebled by travel, and advised a strap for it, which a friend of his would sell for a dollar and a half.  Yet even he may have been a benevolent nature unjustly suspected.

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte, the port of Rochester, and they rattled uneventfully down from Niagara by rail.  At the broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad station; and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basil looked to the transfer of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business by the respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for the boat.  He was slow, and his system was not good,—­he did not give checks for the pieces, but marked them