The Marches, married twenty-five years, take the European tour they could not afford as newlyweds - the ship, the Rhine, Carlsbad, a young couple in trouble whom they cannot help minding about. Howells edited The Atlantic and wrote for Harper's, and was the most powerful literary broker in America; here he does middle age exactly, and the kindness of the book is not softness. Fifty-eight plates of American sea and shore, from Winslow Homer's headlands to Childe Hassam's Isles of Shoals light, keep the salt air of the Marches' crossing in view.