Now, if this was a preconcerted bashfulness, it worked admirably, for we could get nothing that was not immediately before us, unless some philanthropic fellow-sufferer, in pity, sent a pie spinning à la Ravel, down the table. Well, at any rate we had our money's worth of fun, and could bear it much better than if the parlor had been resplendent with mirrors, sofas, tête-à-têtes, and "grand pianos," which so often pave the way for a terrible disappointment as to everything else. We expected little, and got less; but those imperturbable, ghostly girls cost me, many a time and oft during the rest of my journey, a button or a hook and eye, as the picture came up before me.
Talk of Lake George. It is to Lake Champlain what a pretty, little, simpering, pink-and-white doll of a girl is to a magnificent woman, the royal sweep of whose robe about her faultless limbs as she moves, sets all the pulses wild. In mercy to us the clouds parted, and the bright sun broke through at last. You should have seen it then--the queenly Lake Champlain--with the bold, dark islands that seemed to float upon its silvery smoothness, with the heavy rain-clouds gathering up their forces, and gliding majestically away in the distance, leaving a sky as soft and blue as ever arched over Eden. On one side the broad, green, cultivated fields, stretched away fair in the sunlight; on the other, pile upon pile, were the huge, dark mountains, up whose steep sides the soft mist was wreathing itself in a thousand fantastic, graceful shapes. It was a moment such as all of us have sometimes known, when pleasure is so intense as to become almost pain; when language fails; when the eye fills, and there seems more "Bible" between the blue covers of sea and sky than you ever looked upon, or listened to before, and everywhere you turned, a voice--"the still small voice"--seemed saying, all this I made for _you_--for _you_. Now you might thunder the "terrors of the law" in my ears ten months, and it would not move me; but I feel like the veriest wretch alive, when I so intensely enjoy that for which my daily life is so paltry a return.
The boat in which we performed this trip was a Yankee boat, called "The America," and it was enough to rouse one's patriotism to go through it; the shining neatness of its decks and cabins; its efficient and well-mannered stewardess, always on hand, yet never in the way, understanding, as if by intuition, what everybody wanted; the nice, hot, orderly supper, with waiters that had ears, and knew how to use their feet. I was glad it was named "The America." I was as proud of the beautiful boat as if I had laid her keel. But all pleasures must have an end; and our destination being Montreal, we were soon to leave thrifty, go-ahead Yankee-land and all its peculiarities behind. As we passed the pretty town of Burlington, the residence of the poet "Saxe," we all waved him our most cordial good wishes, which we trust the winds bore him safely.