They strolled about the anomalous village on foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of the local preparation.

Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world so large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill them?
They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all these magnificent equipages are waiting about the empty streets for the people who never come to hire them.
"It seems to me that I don't see so many strangers here as I used," Basil had suggested to their driver.
"Oh, they have n't commenced coming yet," he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended that they were plenty enough in July and August.
They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who advertised a table d'hote dinner on a board at his door; and they put their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended that Niagara was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever.

In fact, they observed that their regret for the supposed decline of the Falls as a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in their offers of sympathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.
Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them there, while he walked down the village street, for a closer inspection of the hotels.

At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk's island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side.

He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety.