in perpetual trips up and down the Hudson."

To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly
sketched the life they could lead aboard. Since they could not help it,
they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval between
disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our democratic
'menage' to the taste of the richest and most extravagant plebeian
amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he
minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is
this ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the steamboat berth
into which he gets with his pantaloons on, and out of which he may be
blown by an exploding boiler at any moment; it is he who will have for
supper that overgrown and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon, and will
not let any one else buy tea or toast for a less sum than he pays for his
surfeit; it is he who perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and the
reluctance of the waiters; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of the
saloon, with his womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil
and Isabel sit. Personally, he is not so bad; he is good-looking, like
all of us; he is better dressed than most of us; he behaves himself
quietly, if not easily; and no lord so loathes a scene. Next year he is
going to Europe, where he will not show to so much advantage as here; but
for the present it would be hard to say in what way he is vulgar, and
perhaps vulgarity is not so common a thing after all.

It was something besides the river that made the air so much more
sufferable than it had been. Over the city, since our friends had come
aboard the boat, a black cloud had gathered and now hung low upon it,
while the wind from the face of the water took the dust in the
neighboring streets, and frolicked it about the house-tops, and in the
faces of the arriving passengers, who, as the moment of departure drew