Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



about Blondin to that Cincinnati paper; and to this day I do i860 

 not know whether they ever printed it or not. I try to make fun Howe "* 

 of it now, but it was not funny then. All the way round on that 

 tour, my view of the wonders of nature and the monuments of 

 man was obscured by my anxiety concerning the letters I wrote 

 to that Cincinnati paper; and at all the hotels where I stopped 

 I hurried to examine the files of the reading-room and see whether 

 it had kept faith with me or not. Across many years, across 

 graves not a few, I can reach and recall the hurt vanity, the just 

 resentment, and the baffled hope that were bound up in that 

 early experience of editorial frailty. 



My first visit to Niagara was paid in the midsummer of the 

 year, and the midsummer of my life. All nature was rich and 

 beautifully alive amid scenes which I think are of her noblest. 

 There were places where the fresh scent of the waters was mixed 

 with the fragrance of wild flowers; the birds which sang inau- 

 dibly in the immediate roar of the Cataract made themselves 

 sweetly heard in the heart of Goat Island. Everywhere there 

 were pretty young girls, in hats which they were then beginning 

 to wear after a long regime of bonnets, and their hats had black 

 plumes in them that drooped down as near to the cheeks of the 

 pretty young girls as they could get. 



I can scarcely help heaving a sigh for the wrinkles in those 

 cheeks which the plumes, if they still drooped instead of sticking 

 militantly up on the front and back of the hats, would not be so 

 eager to caress now ; but I will not insist a great deal upon a sort 

 of sigh which has been often known in print already. I think it 

 much more profitable to note that all the entourage of Niagara was 

 then private property, and was put to those money-making uses 

 at the expense of the public which form one of the holiest attrib- 

 utes of that sacred thing. I never greatly objected to the paper- 

 mills on Goat Island; they were impertinent to the scenery, of 

 course, but they were picturesque, with their low-lying, weather- 

 worn masses in the shelter of the forest trees, beside the brawling 

 waters. But nearly every other assertion of private rights in the 



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