Niagara Falls 



1849 on reaching the angle next to the spiral stair, a strong smell is 

 onnycaste p] a j n jy perceptible, something between rotten eggs and sulphur; 

 and there you find a little trickling spring oozing out of the 

 precipice tasting of those delectable compounds. 



A Yankee, with the soaring imagination of that imaginative 

 race, proposes to set fire to the Horse-shoe Fall, and thus get up 

 a grand nocturnal exhibition, to which the Surrey Zoological 

 pyrotechny would bear the same ratio as a sky-rocket to 

 Vesuvius. 



There is no great impossibility in this fact, if it was " not a 

 fact " that the rush of the Fall disturbs the superincumbent gases 

 too much to permit it ; for there can be but little doubt that there 

 is plenty of materiel at hand, and, some day or other, a light- 

 house will be lit with it to guide sleepy loons and other negligent 

 water-fowl over the Falls. I wonder they do not get up a Car- 

 buretted Hydrogen Gas Company there, with a suitable engineer 

 and railway, so that visitors might cross over to Goat Island on 

 an atmospheric line. There are plenty of railway stags on both 

 shores, if you will only buy their stock to establish it ; and, at all 

 events, it would improve the City of the Falls, which now exhibits 

 the deplorable aspect of three stuccoed cottages turned seedy, and 

 a bare common, in place of a magnificent grove of chestnut trees, 

 which formerly almost rivalled Greenwich Park. 



But the crowning glory of " the City " is the Reflecting 

 Pagoda, a thing perched over Table Rock bank, very like a 

 huge pile engine, with a ten-shilling mirror, where the monkey 

 should be. Blessings on Time! though he is a very thoughtless 

 rogue, he has touched this grand effort of human genius in the 

 wooden line slightly, and it will soon follow the horrid water- 

 mill which stood on that most singular and indescribable freak of 

 Nature, the Table Rock. I would have forgiven Lett, the sym- 

 pathizer, if instead of assassination and the blowing-up of Brock's 

 Monument, he had confined his attentions to a little serious Guy 

 Fauxing at the Mill and the Reflecting Pagoda. 



1078 



