64 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



none of them fatiguing. When you start out to " do " the Falls you first drive down 

 about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of looking down from a preci- 

 pice into the narrowest part of the Niagara river. A railway " cut " through a hill 

 would be as comely if it had the angry river tumbling and foaming through its 

 bottom. You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and 

 stand at the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you 

 did it ; but you will then be too late. 



The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little 

 steamer, J/ia:?^^//^^ J/w/, descend the fearful rapids — how first one paddle-box 

 was out of sight behind the raging billows, and then the other, and at what point it 

 was that her smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break 

 and part asunder — and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplish- 

 ing the incredible feat of travelling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in 

 seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was very extraordinary, 

 anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the story nine 

 times in succession to different parties, and never miss a word or alter a sentence 

 or a gesture. 



Then you drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the 

 chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances 

 of having the railway train overhead smashing down on to you. Either possibility 

 is discomforting taken by itself, but mixed together, they amount in the aggregate 

 to positive un happiness. 



On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photogra- 

 phers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontis- 

 piece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on 

 it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and 

 unimportant background of sublime Niagara ; and a great many people have the 

 incredible effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime. 



Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately pictures of 

 papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all 

 smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their 

 carriage, and all looming up in their awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed 



