I am luxuriously established in the saloon, with every imaginable wish attended to, and easy-chairs, books, papers, and cushions enough to satisfy five invalids, but they do not satisfy me. I am bored with the heat, and the whimpering of the pale children, whom a lean, sallow-looking mother feeds unremittingly with "bolivars" and "taffy;" I am tired with the swinging of those lamps overhead, and the everlasting rocking of a stout lady in a red plush rocking-chair, and with looking at the gaudy colors in the carpet, and I rush out for a brisk walk on the deck with Mr. Rutledge. What a day it is! How impossible to be otherwise than happy and hopeful; how inevitably the dark phantoms of doubt and dread take themselves off in the light of such a sun as this, and in the sight of such a scene! The waves dance bright and gay in the sunshine; the mountains rise, on either hand, into the blue and cloudless sky; in a word, the loveliest river in all this lovely river-braided New World lays before me, the heart of seventeen beats in my bosom, the glow of health and exercise tingles in my veins; what wonder that I forget the tears of yesterday, the separation, the homesickness, the loneliness that I so dreaded. Neither can my companion altogether resist the influences of the hour. If the sharp air and the quick walk have, as he says, made the tardy roses bloom again on my cheeks, they have also brought a glow to his face, and a sparkle to his eye, and untamed wit and sarcasm to his lips. He quizzes our fellow voyagers, tells me odd stories of former travel, droll sketches of western journeyings, and California "experiences." Then the laugh dies, as some winding of the river brings suddenly before us a picture too grand to be looked at with trifling words and laughter on our lips. And Mr. Rutledge has the "right thing" to say then, in his rich manly voice, and the right words to embody the voiceless thoughts that crowd to my own lips--words that do not jar or desecrate, but make the beauty tangible and the grandeur more ennobling.