Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge, and here Basil saw an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss, who, when he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank bridge.  Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous.  The gentleman took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a distinguished phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

“On your bridal tour, I presume,” he continued, as they approached the bench where Basil had left Isabel.  She had now the company of a plain, middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness.  “Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife ’s been here once before on the same business.  We see a good many changes.  I used to stand on Table Rock with the others.  Now that’s all gone.  Well, old lady, shall we move on?” he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply, by the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard’s party sat at the table next Basil’s, and they were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall.

“Well, Kitty,” the married lady was saying, you can tell the girls what you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home.  They’ll believe anything sooner than the truth.”

“O yes, indeed,” said Kitty, “I’ve got a good deal of it made up already.  I’ll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most.  I’m going to have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long blond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he’s got to do duty in accounting for my missing glove.  It’ll never do to tell the girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower.  Then you know, Fanny, I really can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon by their black servants.”

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the first time since the war.  He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its way.  He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid.  The fact did not quite answer to the young lady’s description of it, and get it certainly afforded her a ground-work.  Basil fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to find it so changed.