Travelers' Original Accounts: 1 80/ -1 840 



1816-1817 



HALL, FRANCIS. Travels in Canada and the United States, in 1816 1316-17 



Hall 



and 1817. Lond. : Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orrnc, & Brown. 1818. 

 Pp. 230-238. 



Like many another visitor to the Falls this author felt that to describe 

 the Falls was " to tell a thrice told tale," but yet could not restrain the 

 desire to record at least some of the emotions which the spectacle inspired. 

 He was a careful observer and his account is sensible. Especially inter- 

 esting are his remarks on the increased accessibility of the Falls. He 

 boldly accepts the recession theory regardless of the havoc which it plays 

 with the accepted chronology. 



At Queenston, seven miles from the falls, their sound, united 

 with the rushing of the river, is distinctly heard. At the distance 

 of about a mile, a white cloud hovering over the trees, indicates 

 their situation: it is not, however, until the road emerges from a 

 close country into the space of open ground immediately in their 

 vicinity, that the white volumes of foam are seen, as if boiling 

 up from a sulphurous gulph. Here a foot-path turns from the 

 road, towards a wooded cliff. The rapids are beheld on the 

 right, rushing, for the space of a mile, like a tempestuous sea. 

 A narrow tract descends about 60 feet down the cliff, and con- 

 tinues across a plashy meadow, through a copse, encumbered 

 with masses of limestone; extricated from which, I found myself 

 on the Table Rock, at the very point where the river precipitates 

 itself into the abyss. The rapid motion of the waters, the 

 stunning noise, the mounting clouds, almost persuade the startled 

 senses, that the rock itself is tottering, and on the point of rolling 

 down into the gulph, which swallows up the mass of descending 

 waters. I bent over it, to mark the clouds rolling white beneath 

 me, as in an inverted sky, illumined by a most brilliant rainbow, — 

 one of those features of softness which Nature delights to pencil 

 amid her wildest scenes, tempering her awfulness with beauty, 

 and making her very terrors lovely. 



There is a ladder about half a mile below the Table Rock, 

 by which I descended the cliff, to reach the foot of the fall. 



10 MS 



