This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when Basil made his first visit to Niagara, he had approached from the west by way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existed before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his past, was resolved to draw near the great cataract by no other route.

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his hard-heartedness.  The sigh touched him, and he suggested a carriage-ride through the city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had been thinking of.  She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was taken by surprise.  “If ever we leave Boston,” she said, “we will not live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we’ll come to Buffalo.”  She found that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides.  A delicious freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, with no line between sharper than that which divides drowsing from dreaming.  But the color was the most charming thing, that delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of the sea-blue, but infinitely softer and lovelier.  The nearer expanses rippled with dainty waves, silver and lucent; the further levels made, with the sun-dimmed summer sky, a vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the white sails of ships, and stained by the smoke of steamers.

“Take me away now,” said Isabel, when her eyes had feasted upon all this, “and don’t let me see another thing till I get to Niagara.  Nothing less sublime is worthy the eyes that have beheld such beauty.”

However, on the way to Niagara she consented to glimpses of the river which carries the waters of the lake for their mighty plunge, and which shows itself very nobly from time to time as you draw toward the cataract, with wooded or cultivated islands, and rich farms along its low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye the shining white of the rapids,—­a hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness to be revealed.

VI.  NIAGARA.

As the train stopped, Isabel’s heart beat with a child-like exultation, as I believe every one’s heart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara.  She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, that she heard the roar of the cataract, and now, when she alighted from the car, she was sure she should have heard it but for the vulgar little noises that attend the arrival of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere else.  “Never mind, dearest; you shall be stunned with it before you leave,” promised her husband; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode through the quaint streets of the village, where it remains a question whether the lowliness of the shops and private houses makes the hotels look so vast, or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings.  The immense caravansaries swelling