hopeless conjecture about her.  Was she visiting there, or was the interior of Canada full of such stylish and exquisite creatures?  Where did she get her taste, her fashions, her manners?  As she passed from sight towards the shadow of the woods, they felt the poorer for her going; yet they were glad to have seen her, and on second thoughts they felt that they could not justly ask more of her than to have merely existed for a few hours in their presence.  They perceived that beauty was not only its own excuse for being, but that it flattered and favored and profited the world by consenting to be.

At Prescott, the boat on which they had come from Charlotte, and on which they had been promised a passage without change to Montreal, stopped, and they were transferred to a smaller steamer with the uncomfortable name of Banshee.  She was very old, and very infirm and dirty, and in every way bore out the character of a squalid Irish goblin.  Besides, she was already heavily laden with passengers, and, with the addition of the other steamer’s people had now double her complement; and our friends doubted if they were not to pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort.  Their fellow-passengers were in great variety, however, and thus partly atoned for their numbers.  Among them of course there was a full force of brides from Niagara and elsewhere, and some curious forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared.  It is well enough, if she likes, and it may even be very noble for a passably good-looking young lady to marry a gentleman of venerable age; but to intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively caressing his wrinkled front seems too reproachful of the general public; while, on the other hand, if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlists in behalf of the white-haired husband the unwilling sympathies of the spectator to see her the centre of a group of young people, and him only acknowledged from time to time by a Parthian snub.  Nothing, however, could have been more satisfactory than the sisterly surrounding of this latter bride.  They were of a better class of Irish people; and if it had been any sacrifice for her to marry so old a man, they were doing their best to give the affair at least the liveliness of a wake.  There were five or six of those great handsome girls, with their generous curves and wholesome colors, and they were every one attended by a good-looking colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly brogued voices, and laughed with careless Celtic laughter.  One of the young fellows presently lost his hat overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief of his lady about his head; and this appeared to be really one of the best things in the world, and led to endless banter.  They were well dressed, and it could be imagined that the ancient bridegroom had come in for the support of the whole good-looking, healthy, light-hearted family.  In some degree he looked it, and wore but a rueful countenance for a bridegroom; so that a very young newly married couple, who sat next the jolly sister-and-loverhood could not keep their pitying eyes off his downcast face.  “What if he, too, were young at heart!” the kind little wife’s regard seemed to say.