Travelers* Original Accounts Since 1840 



artist friends, and very likely the reader, if he is a person of feeble i860 

 fancy, small sympathy, and indifferent morals, will find nothing we 

 of this Repose that I speak of in Niagara. I imagine him taking 

 my page out into the presence of the fact, and demanding, 

 Now where is the Repose? 



Well, all that I can say is that it has always been there on 

 the occasion of my visits. On the occasion of my first visit 

 there was even a shelf of the Table Rock still there, and I went 

 out and stood upon it, for the sake of saying that I had done so 

 in my letter to the Cincinnati paper, though I might very well 

 have said it without having done so, and I am almost sorry that 

 I did not, when I remember how few of those letters that paper 

 printed. There was no great pleasure in the experience. You 

 were supposed to get a particularly fine view of the Horse Shoe 

 Falls, but I got no view at all, on account of a whim of the mist. 

 Weeks earlier a large piece of the rock had fallen just a few 

 moments after a carriage full of people had driven off it, and 

 I did not know but another piece might fall just a few moments 

 before I walked off it. I was not in a carriage, and my portion 

 of Table Rock did not fall till some three months later ; that was 

 quite soon enough for me; I should have preferred three years. 



I do not know whether it was my satisfaction in this hair- 

 breadth escape or not, but I had sufficient spirits immediately 

 after to join a group of people near by who were taking peeps 

 over a precipice at something below. I did not know what it 

 was, but I thought it might be something I could work up in my 

 letters to that Cincinnati paper, and I waited my turn among 

 those who were lying successively on their stomachs and craning 

 their necks over the edge; and then I saw that it was a man 

 who was lying face upwards on the rocks below, and had per- 

 haps been lying there some time. He was a very green and 

 yellow melancholy of a man, as to his face, and in his workman's 

 blue overalls he had a trick of swimming upwards to the eye of 

 the aesthetic spectator, so that one had to push back with a hard 

 clutch on the turf to keep from plunging over to meet him. I 



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