Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



tied them in at the knees with white tape to keep them off the 1913 

 ground, for they seemed to have been made for a woman at least Alec-Tweedie 

 six feet six inches in height. Goloshes — so loved by The Pri- 

 vate Secretary and by all Americans — were next adjusted from 

 a row which contained some hundreds of pairs, reminding us of 

 Ibsen's hall in Christiania, where we saw goloshes standing in 

 rows one snowy winter; then the coat was fixed, and the head- 

 gear, after putting a towel round the throat, was strapped on. 

 What a sight. What sights, indeed, we all looked! Then out 

 into the sunshine we went, men and women seeming exactly alike, 

 and yet each more hideous than the other. We laughed and 

 chatted, got into the lift, and were whirled below, to walk along 

 a small wooden pathway with occasional staircases, — all very 

 slippery, and, to our thinking, not over substantial. It became 

 wetter and wetter under foot and more drenching from above 

 as we proceeded, and we soon realised the good lady was right; 

 no ordinary clothing could have withstood a millionth part of 

 the spray of Niagara. 



We paused almost in front of a branch of the Fall and tried 

 to look up; but so blinding was the whirlwind of spray that we 

 could hardly see. 



The cavern was washed out by the wash of ages. 



A huge sheet of water, a stupendous curtain of force, so thick 

 that its transparent drops were massed into a translucent wall, 

 fell beside us. It was so thick, so dense, so immense that we 

 could barely see the beams of light through that massive veil of 

 water. 



The spray filled our eyes, hung upon our lashes, ran down 

 our noses until we tried to gasp out that we had seen enough; 

 and gladly turned away. The sound was deafening; we could 

 not hear one another speak. The spray was too great to allow 

 us to see anything, and yet this was only a small branch of the 

 Falls themselves. It gave a wonderful idea of what the hourly, 

 weekly, monthly, yearly overflow of those Falls, which Goat 

 Island divides, must be. 



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