University of Virginia Library

10. X.
HOMEWARD AND HOME.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 278. In-line Illustration. Image of a man looking through a large trunk while a woman watches. Other figures and luggage can be seen in the background.]

The travellers
all met
at breakfast
and duly discussed
the
adventures of
the night;
and for the
rest, the forenoon passed rapidly and slowly with
Basil and Isabel, as regret to leave Quebec, or the
natural impatience of travellers to be off, overcame
them. Isabel spent part of it in shopping, for she
had found some small sums of money and certain odd
corners in her trunks still unappropriated, and the
handsome stores on the Rue Fabrique were very
tempting. She said she would just go in and look;
and the wise reader imagines the result. As she
knelt over her boxes, trying so to distribute her
purchases as to make them look as if they were old,
— old things of hers, which she had brought all the
way round from Boston with her, — a fleeting touch
of conscience stayed her hand.

“Basil,” she said, “perhaps we'd better declare

some of these things. What 's the duty on those?”
she asked, pointing to certain articles.

“I don't know. About a hundred per cent. ad
valorem.”

“C'est à dire —?”

“As much as they cost.”

“O then, dearest,” responded Isabel indignantly,
“it can't be wrong to smuggle! I won't declare a
thread!”

“That 's very well for you, whom they won't
ask. But what if they ask me whether there 's
anything to declare?”

Isabel looked at her husband and hesitated.
Then she replied in terms that I am proud to
record in honor of American womanhood: “You
mustn't fib about it, Basil” (heroically); “I
couldn't respect you if you did” (tenderly);
“but” (with decision) “you must slip out of it
some way!”

The ladies of the Ellison party, to whom she put
the case in the parlor, agreed with her perfectly.
They also had done a little shopping in Quebec,
and they meant to do more at Montreal before
they returned to the States. Mrs. Ellison was disposed
to look upon Isabel's compunctions as a kind
of treason to the sex, to be forgiven only because
so quickly repented.

The Ellisons were going up the Saguenay before
coming on to Boston, and urged our friends hard
to go with them. “No, that must be for another

time,” said Isabel. “Mr. March has to be home
by a certain day; and we shall just get back in
season.” Then she made them promise to spend a
day with her in Boston, and the Colonel coming to
say that he had a carriage at the door for their excursion
to Lorette, the two parties bade good-by
with affection and many explicit hopes of meeting
soon again.

“What do you think of them, dearest?” demanded
Isabel, as she sallied out with Basil for a
final look at Quebec.

“The young lady is the nicest; and the other is
well enough, too. She is a good deal like you, but
with the sense of humor left out. You've only
enough to save you.”

“Well, her husband is jolly enough for both of
them. He 's funnier than you, Basil, and he hasn't
any of your little languid airs and affectations. I
don't know but I'm a bit disappointed in my choice,
darling; but I dare say I shall work out of it. In
fact, I don't know but the Colonel is a little too
jolly. This drolling everything is rather fatiguing.”
And having begun, they did not stop till they had
taken their friends to pieces. Dismayed, then, they
hastily reconstructed them, and said that they were
among the pleasantest people they ever knew, and
they were really very sorry to part with them, and
they should do everything to make them have a
good time in Boston.

They were sauntering towards Durham Terrace,

where they leaned long upon the iron parapet and
blest themselves with the beauty of the prospect.
A tender haze hung upon the landscape and subdued
it till the scene was as a dream before them.
As in a dream the river lay, and dream-like the
shipping moved or rested on its deep, broad bosom.
Far off stretched the happy fields with their dim
white villages; farther still the mellow heights
melted into the low hovering heaven. The tinned
roofs of the Lower Town twinkled in the morning
sun; around them on every hand, on that Monday
forenoon when the States were stirring from ocean
to ocean in feverish industry, drowsed the gray city
within her walls; from the flag-staff of the citadel
hung the red banner of Saint George in sleep.

Their hearts were strangely and deeply moved.
It seemed to them that they looked upon the last
stronghold of the Past, and that afar off to the
southward they could hear the marching hosts of
the invading Present; and as no young and loving
soul can relinquish old things without a pang, they
sighed a long mute farewell to Quebec.

Next summer they would come again, yes; but,
ah me! every one knows what next summer is!

Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the
omnibus to the Grand Trunk Ferry with them, and
were good-natured to the last, having shaken hands
all round with the waiters, chambermaids, and
porters of the hotel. The young fellow with the bad

amiable face came in a calash, and refused to overpay
the driver with a gay decision that made him
Basil's envy till he saw his tribulation in getting
the troupe's luggage checked. There were forty
pieces, and it always remained a mystery, considering
the small amount of clothing necessary to those
people on the stage, what could have filled their
trunks. The young man and the two English
blondes of American birth found places in the same
car with our tourists, and enlivened the journey
with their frolics. When the young man pretended
to fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head
in a shawl, and vexed him with many thumps and
thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handful
of almonds; and the ladies having no other way to
eat them, one of them saucily snatched off her shoe,
and cracked them hammerwise with the heel. It
was all so pleasant that it ought to have been all
right; and in their merry world of outlawry perhaps
things are not so bad as we like to think them.

The country into which the train plunges as soon
as Quebec is out of sight is very stupidly savage,
and our friends had little else to do but to watch
the gambols of the players, till they came to the
river St. Francis, whose wandering loveliness the
road follows through an infinite series of soft and
beautiful landscapes, and finds everywhere glassing
in its smooth current the elms and willows
of its gentle shores. At one place, where its calm
broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge sawmill,

covering the stream with logs and refuse, and
the banks with whole cities of lumber; which also
they accepted as no mean elements of the picturesque.
They clung the most tenderly to traces of the
peasant life they were leaving. When some French
boys came aboard with wild raspberries to sell in
little birch-bark canoes, they thrilled with pleasure,
and bought them, but sighed then, and said, “What
thing characteristic of the local life will they sell
us in Maine when we get there? A section of pie
poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the squash-vine,
or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising
the new Dollar Store in Portland?” They
saw the quaintness vanish from the farm-houses;
first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the
steep roof, then the steep roof itself. By and by
they came to a store with a Grecian portico and
four square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked
no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at
Island Pond took place at nine o'clock, without costing
them a cent of duty or a pang of conscience.
At that charming station the trunks are piled
higgledy-piggledy into a room beside the track,
where a few inspectors with stiffling lamps of smoky
kerosene await the passengers. There are no porters
to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman
digs out his box, and opens it before the
lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents with an
unpleasant hand and passes it. He makes you feel

that you are once more in the land of official insolence,
and that, whatever you are collectively, you
are nothing personally. Isabel, who had sent her
husband upon this business with quaking meekness
of heart, experienced the bold indignation of virtue
at his account of the way people were made their
own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused
when he painted the vile terrors of each husband as
he tremblingly unlocked his wife's store of contraband.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy
meadows of western-looking Maine; and the Grand
Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind
time into Portland. All breakfastless they hurried
aboard the Boston train on the Eastern Road,
and all along that line (which is built to show how
uninteresting the earth can be when she is ennuyée
of both sea and land), Basil's life became a struggle
to construct a meal from the fragmentary opportunities
of twenty different stations where they
stopped five minutes for refreshments. At one
place he achieved two cups of shameless chickory,
at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of
elderly bananas.

they softly sang as the successive courses of this
feast were disposed of.

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped
during their sojourn in Canada, brooded

sovereign upon the tiresome landscape. The red
granite rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the
deep cuts were like ash-heaps; over the fields danced
the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they almost
heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the
train. When they reached Boston at last, they
were dustier than most of us would like to be a
hundred years hence. The whole city was equally
dusty; and they found the trees in the square before
their own door gray with dust. The bit of
Virginia-creeper planted under the window hung
shriveled upon its trellis.

But Isabel's aunt met them with a refreshing
shower of tears and kisses in the hall, throwing a
solid arm about each of them. “O you dears!”
the good soul cried, “you don't know how anxious
I've been about you; so many accidents happening
all the time. I've never read the “Evening Transcript”
till the next morning, for fear I should find
your names among the killed and wounded.”

“O aunty, you're too good, always!” whimpered
Isabel; and neither of the women took note of Basil,
who said, “Yes, it 's probably the only thing that
preserved our lives.”

The little tinge of discontent, which had colored
their sentiment of return faded now in the kindly
light of home. Their holiday was over, to be sure,
but their bliss had but begun; they had entered
upon that long life of holidays which is happy
marriage. By the time dinner was ended they were

both enthusiastic at having got back, and taking
their aunt between them walked up and down the
parlor with their arms round her massive waist, and
talked out the gladness of their souls.

Then Basil said he really must run down to the
office that afternoon, and he issued all aglow upon
the street. He was so full of having been long away
and of having just returned, that he unconsciously
tried to impart his mood to Boston, and the dusty
composure of the street and houses, as he strode
along, bewildered him. He longed for some familiar
face to welcome him, and in the horse-car into
which he stepped he was charmed to see an acquaintance.
This was a man for whom ordinarily he cared
nothing, and whom he would perhaps rather have
gone out upon the platform to avoid than have
spoken to; but now he plunged at him with effusion,
and wrung his hand, smiling from ear to ear.

The other remained coldly unaffected, after a first
start of surprise at his cordiality, and then reviled
the dust and heat. “But I'm going to take a little
run down to Newport, to-morrow, for a week,” he
said. “By the way, you look as if you needed a
little change. Aren't you going anywhere this
summer?”

“So you see, my dear,” observed Basil, when he
had recounted the fact to Isabel at tea, “our travels
are incommunicably our own. We had best say
nothing about our little jaunt to other people, and

they won't know we've been gone. Even if we
tried, we couldn't make our wedding-journey
theirs.”

She gave him a great kiss of recompense and
consolation. “Who wants it,” she demanded, “to
be Their Wedding Journey?”