Preservation of the Falls 



Goat Island, of which every one has heard, is the great 1871 

 menagerie of lions, and the spot where your single stone — or, in 

 plain prose, your half-dollar — kills most birds. This broad 

 insular strip, which performs the excellent office of withholding 

 the American shore from immediate contact with the Fall, has 

 been allowed to remain a very proper piece of wildness, and 

 here you may ramble, for the most part, in undiverted contempla- 

 tion. The island is owned, I believe, by a family of co-heritors, 

 who have the good taste to preserve it intact. More than once, 

 however, as I have been told, they have been offered a large 

 price for the privilege of building a hotel upon this sacred soil. 

 They have been wise, but, after all, they are human, and the 

 offer may be made once too often. Before this fatal day dawns, 

 why shouldn't the State buy up the precious acres, as California 

 has done the Yo-Semite? It is the opinion of a sentimental tourist 

 that no price would be too great to pay. Otherwise, the only 

 hope for their integrity is in the possibility of a shrewd prevision 

 on the part of the gentlemen who know how to keep hotels that 

 the music of the dinner-band would be injured by the roar of the 

 cataract. You approach from Goat Island the left abutment of 

 the Horseshoe. The little tower which, with the classic rainbow, 

 figures in all " views " of the scene, is planted at a dozen feet 

 from the shore, directly on the shoulder of the Fall. This little 

 tower, I think, deserves a compliment. One might have said 

 beforehand that it would never do, but, as it stands, it is incon- 

 testably picturesque. It serves as a unit of appreciation of the 

 scale of things, and from its spray-blackened summit it admits 

 you to an almost downward peep into the green gulf. More 

 here, even, than on the Canada edge, you perceive how the great 

 spectacle is wrought all in water. Its substantial floods take on 

 at moments the likeness of walls and pillars and columns, and, 

 to present any vivid picture of them, we are compelled to talk 

 freely of emerald and crystal, of silver and marble. But really, 

 all the simplicity of the Falls, and half their grandeur, reside in 



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