Niagara Revisited                                   7

also refused to pay, he threatened suit and forced the company to
destroy the issue. Fortunately, a few copies of this entertaining
reminder of the adventutcs of the Match family escaped destruc¬
tion. Though the sketch itself is slight enough, it forms a link
between the first story of Isabel and Basil March, which was told
by Howells in Their Wedding Journey in 1871, and the subsequent
accounts of theit experiences in eight othet novels and stoties with
which the authot delighted his readers for fifty years.

II

Readers of the Atlantic Monthly first became acquainted with Basil
and Isabel March when they read the opening chapters of Their
Wedding Journey in the July, 187 i, issue of their favorite magazine.
They caught a tantalizingly brief glimpse of the couple just leaving
a Quebec hotel and still on their honeymoon in the fitst installment
of A Chance Acquaintance in the January, 1873, issue of the same
periodical. When Niagara Revisited appeared, ten years after A
Chance Acquaintance, our romantic pair, now twelve years older and
twelve years wiser, were welcomed by a public which had grown
to know them not only through the pages of the Atlantic but also
as they had been presented in the clever pen drawings of Augustus
Hoppin, who had illustrated the novels when they came out in
book form. Niagara Revisited, even without the colored plates in
the pamphlet owned by the Columbia Library, pleased the readers
of 188 3 sufficiently to encouf age Howells to reprint the twelve-page
sketch at the end of evety edition of Their Wedding Journey after
that date.

Howells informed his readers in the opening patagraph of this
sketch, which sounds like an informal letter to old friends, that
Basil was now forty-two and Isabel, thirty-nine; that, since last
heard from, their two children had reached the ages of eleven and
nine. Specific teferenccs to the ages of the four members of this
famous family prove to be of particulat interest. For in the ten
stories and novels, written by Howells between 1871 and 1920,
it is only in Niagara Revisited that their exact ages, in a cettain