The wedding-journeyers looked at each other with eyes of sad amaze.  They bowed themselves for a moment to the viands, and then by an equal impulse refrained.  They were sufficiently young, they were happy, they were hungry; nature is great and strong, but art is greater, and before these triumphs of the cook at the Albany depot appetite succumbed.  By a terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor in their cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the character and history of the materials of that breakfast.

Presently Isabel paused, played a little with her knife, and, after a moment looked up at her husband with an arch regard and said:  “I was just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where our train once stopped for breakfast.  I remember the freshness and brightness of everything on the little tables,—­the plates, the napkins, the gleaming half-bottles of wine.  They seemed to have been preparing that breakfast for us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly seated before they served us with great cups of ‘cafe-au-lait’, and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and potatoes,—­such potatoes!  Dear me, how little I ate of it!  I wish, for once, I’d had your appetite, Basil; I do indeed.”

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despite the tragical contrast her words had suggested, Basil finally joined.  So much amazement had probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted in that place; but their lightness did not at all commend them.  The waitress had not liked it from the first, and had served them with reluctance; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon them as if he believed them about to escape without payment.  Here, then, they had enforced a great fact of travelling,—­that people who serve the public are kindly and pleasant in proportion as they serve it well.  The unjust and the inefficient have always that consciousness of evil which will not let a man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact.  There was already such heat from without, even at eight o’clock in the morning, that they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly took their places in the train, which had been made up for departure.  They had deliberately rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel.  Now, in reward, they found themselves quite comfortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to view the scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much complacency.  There was sufficient draught through the open window to make the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart.  It is a landscape that I greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil