their comfortable persons.  A little girl with them was attired in like gayety of color.  “What is her name?” asked Isabel, paying for a bead pincushion.  “Daisy Smith,” said her mother, in distressingly good English.  “But her Indian name?” “She has none,” answered the woman, who told Basil that her village numbered five hundred people, and that they were Protestants.  While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whom the women saluted musically in their native tongue.  This was somewhat consoling; but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and it could have been wished that he had not a silk hat on.

“Still,” said Isabel, as they turned away, “I’m glad he hasn’t Lisle-thread gloves, like that chieftain we saw putting his forest queen on board the train at Oneida.  But how shocking that they should be Christians, and Protestants!  It would have been bad enough to have them Catholics.  And that woman said that they were increasing.  They ought to be fading away.”

On the bridge, they paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their wild variety, with the white crests of breaking surf, the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the deathful course beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the horror of being cast upon it, and then hurried over the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose wildness they sought refuge from the sight and sound.

There had been rain in the night; the air war full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twittering birds.  Presently they came to a bench set in a corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vista of sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam of the foaming river beyond.  As they sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their courtship, began to recite a poem.  It was one which had been haunting him since his first sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart in his youth—­the rhyme of some poor newspaper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clipping his name from the bottom.  It had always lingered in Basil’s memory, rather from the interest of the awful fact it recorded, than from any merit of its own; and now he recalled it with a distinctness that surprised him.

Avery.

I.
All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,
Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,
Out of the hell of the rapids as ’twere a lost soul’s cries
Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,
Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught. 
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rang.