Basil had promised the children a sight of the Rapids before they reached the Falls, and they held him rigidly accountable from the moment they entered the train, and began to run out of the city between the river and the canal.  He attempted a diversion with the canal boats, and tried to bring forward the subject of Rudder Grange in that connection.  They said that the canal boats were splendid, but they were looking for the Rapids now; and they declined to be interested in a window in one of the boats, which Basil said was just like the window that the Rudder Granger and the boarder had popped Pomona out of when they took her for a burglar.

“You spoil those children, Basil,” said his wife, as they clambered over him, and clamored for the Rapids.

“At present I’m giving them an object-lesson in patience and self-denial; they are experiencing the fact that they can’t have the Rapids till they get to them, and probably they’ll be disappointed in them when they arrive.”

In fact, they valued the Rapids very little more than the Hoosac Tunnel, when they came in sight of them, at last; and Basil had some question in his own mind whether the Rapids had not dwindled since his former visit.  He did not breathe this doubt to Isabel, however, and she arrived at the Falls with unabated expectations.  They were going to spend only half a day there; and they turned into the station, away from the phalanx of omnibuses, when they dismounted from their train.  They seemed, as before, to be the only passengers who had arrived, and they found an abundant choice of carriages waiting in the street, outside the station.  The Niagara hackman may once have been a predatory and very rampant animal, but public opinion, long expressed through the public prints, has reduced him to silence and meekness.  Apparently, he may not so much as beckon with his whip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that he cannot cross the pavement to the station door; and Basil, inviting one of them to negotiation, was himself required by the attendant policeman to step out to the curbstone, and complete his transaction there.  It was an impressive illustration of the power of a free press, but upon the whole Basil found the effect melancholy; it had the saddening quality which inheres in every sort of perfection.  The hackman, reduced to entire order, appealed to his compassion, and he had not the heart to beat him down from his moderate first demand, as perhaps he ought to have done.  They drove directly to the cataract, and found themselves in the pretty grove beside the American Fall, and in the air whose dampness was as familiar as if they had breathed it all their childhood.  It was full now of the fragrance of some sort of wild blossom; and again they had that old, entrancing sense of the mingled awfulness and loveliness of the great spectacle.  This sylvan perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, the mildness of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead,