Niagara Falls 



i860 made a note of this morbid impulse for primary use in my letters 

 to that Cincinnati paper, and secondary use in a poem, or sketch, 

 or tale; and then I crawled back and went away, and was faint 

 in secret for a while. It was strange how fully sufficing one 

 little glimpse of that poor man was. No one knew who he was 

 or how he had fallen over there, but after the first glance at him 

 (I believe I did not give a second) I felt that we did not part 

 strangers. Now I meet people at dinner and pass whole evenings 

 with them, and cannot remember their faces so as to place them 

 the next week. But I think I could have placed that poor man 

 years afterwards. To be sure the circumstances are different, 

 and I am no longer twenty-three. 



Do they still, I wonder, take people to see a place not far 

 above the Canadian Fall, where a vein of natural gas vents 

 itself amid the trouble of the waters, and the custodian sets fire 

 to it with a piece of lighted newspaper? They used to do that, 

 if you paid them a quarter, in a little pavilion built over the 

 place to shut out the unpaying public. By comparison with the 

 great gas wells which I saw in combustion long after at Findlay, 

 this was a very feeble rush light conflagration indeed, but it had 

 the merit of being much more mysterious. I, for instance, did not 

 know it was natural gas, or what it was, and the custodian sagely 

 would not say; the mystery was probably part of his stock in 

 trade. There were many mysteries, maintained at a profit, about 

 Niagara then, and not the least of them was Terrapin Tower, 

 which stood at the brink of the American Fall, and was reached 

 by a series of stepping stones and bridges amidst the rapids. The 

 mystery of this was that any human being should wish to go 

 up it, but everybody did. I myself found a bridal couple (of 

 the third espousals) in it when I ventured a vast deal of potential 

 literature in its frail keeping; no terrapin, I fancy, was ever so 

 rash as to ascend it, from the day it was built to the day it was 

 taken away. What is so amusing now to think of, though not 

 so amusing then, is that all the while I was clambering about 



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