On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the thermometer for the brief time of the transit.  But presently they drew near that strange, irregular row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York aide, and before the boat’s motion ceased the air grew thick and warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the buildings front.  Upon this the boat’s passengers issued, passing up through a gangway, on one side of which a throng of return-passengers was pent by a gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild animals.  They were streaming with perspiration, and, according to their different temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor.

“Now the question is, my dear,” said Basil when, free of the press, they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, “whether we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion.  By this route we shall have sights end smells which the other can’t offer us, but whichever we take we shall be sorry.”

“Then I say take this,” decided Isabel.  “I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms, this weather.”

They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it.  Well for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with regard to the whole day’s business, or if she could have given up her plans for it, with the same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat!  It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do.  It matters very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end.  The mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure.  We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes.  If I had been Columbus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as ever I came in sight of their granite perch should have turned back to England.  But it is now too late to repair these errors, and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which had wiselier been left unaccomplished.  Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then