"Have you ever been at Niagara, Marion?" asked Bell Crawford, leaning over her with a sisterly caress.
"No," answered the young girl, looking away from her book, but without any indication of rising or any sign of that anxious agitation which inevitably brightens the faces of most American girls who have not seen the world's-wonder, when that magic word is uttered in their presence. "Father and some friends were at Saratoga once, when I was a very little girl. But father was drowned at sea. Grandfather never came North."
"Would you like to see Niagara?" was Bell's second question.
"I do not know," answered the young Virginian girl, with strange coolness and candor. "I think I should like to see it as well as anything else. I have not seen many waterfalls. I once saw the Falls of the Black Fork of Cheat; and I saw the Natural Bridge. They are both in Virginia. I do not know whether I should like Niagara or not."
"Would you like to go there. Suppose brother and myself were going to Niagara and should ask you to go with us—would you be pleased to go?"
"I would as lief go as stay here or go anywhere else," said the singular girl.
"I thought you might possibly have objections to going, because there is so much company at Niagara, and because you have so lately lost your grandfather—that is why I asked," explained Bell.
"I do not mind the company. They are nothing to me. I do not mourn for my poor grandfather aloud. But you are very kind to think of me," answered the little enigma. And with that very unenthusiastic endorsement of the Niagara project, Bell Crawford was compelled to descend the stairs and make report of the event of her embassy. But the result was held to be rather satisfactory than otherwise, and the hastily-devised arrangements for Niagara went forward.
To pass rapidly over that movement, the manner of which does not in any degree affect the progress of this narration, let it be said that on Wednesday, the 9th of July, the two brothers, the sister and their guest, with the proper array of the "great North River travelling-trunks" and other baggage, took the steamer Daniel Drew for a sail by daylight up the Hudson, as the mode of making half the journey least fatiguing to the recovering invalid. That the three New Yorkers, to whom the scenery of that noble river was thoroughly familiar, clapped hands and shouted their joy once more, nearly all day, at the flashing blue of the river, the rafts of steamboats, sloops and tows that continually came sweeping down it, the rugged frowning of the Palisades, the narrow-passes and rugged peaks of the Highlands, and the long, blue, uneven line of the Cattskills, with the white glimmering of the Mountain House,—while the young Virginian girl, introduced to that scenery for the first time in her life, seemed to maintain her calmness and comparative insensibility. That they rested for the night at Albany, out of respect to the comfort of the invalid—John Crawford submitting under protest, and declaring Albany, after Washington, the most unendurable "one-horse town" in the universe. That they took the cars of the Central Road in the morning, Richard being so pillowed among cloaks and blankets and shawls, that he had quite the comfort of lying in an ordinary bed; and that on Thursday night, the Tenth of July, when the full moon had risen so high in heaven as to make the coming midnight a very mockery of day, they rolled into the village of Niagara Falls, and found a resting-place at the still wide-awake and ever-lively Cataract.