Niagara Falls 



1886 and her husband mistook her pantomime for gestures of wonder 

 Warner anc j admiration. Some moments passed, and then the curtain 

 swung in, and tons of water drenched the Englishman, and for 

 an instant hid him from sight. Then, as the curtain swung back, 

 he was seen clinging to the handrail, sputtering and astonished 

 at such treatment. He came up the bank dripping, and declaring 

 that it was extraordinary, most extraordinary, but he wouldn't 

 have missed it for the world. From this platform one looks down 

 the narrow, slippery stairs that are lost in the boiling mist, and 

 wonders at the daring that built these steps down into that hell, 

 and carried the frail walk of planks over the bowlders outside the 

 fall. A party in oil-skins, making their way there, looked like 

 lost men and women in a Dante Inferno. The turbulent waters 

 dashed all about them ; the mist occasionally wrapped them from 

 sight; they clung to the rails, they tried to speak to each other; 

 their gestures seemed motions of despair. Could that be Eurydice 

 whom the rough guide was tenderly dragging out of the hell of 

 waters, up the stony path, that singular figure in oil-skin trousers, 

 who disclosed a pretty face inside her hood as she emerged? 

 One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue such a 

 woman; but why take her there? The group of adventurers 

 stopped a moment on the platform, with the opening into the 

 misty cavern for a background, and the artist said that the pic- 

 ture was, beyond all power of the pencil, strange and fantastic. 

 There is nothing, after all, that the human race will not dare 

 for a new sensation. 



The walk around Goat Island is probably unsurpassed in the 

 world for wonder and beauty. The Americans have every rea- 

 son to be satisfied with their share of the fall ; they get nowhere 

 one single grand view like that from the Canada side, but 

 infinitely the deepest impression of majesty and power is obtained 

 on Goat Island. There the spectator is in the midst of the war 

 of nature. From the point over the Horseshoe Fall our friends, 

 speaking not much, but more and more deeply moved, strolled 



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