 | Inklings of adventure |  |
NIAGARA — LAKE ONTARIO —
THE ST. LAWRENCE.
1. No. I.
NIAGARA.
“He was born when the crab was ascending, and all his affairs go
backward.”
—Love for Love.
It was in my senior vacation, and I was bound to
Niagara for the first time. My companion was a
specimen of the human race found rarely in Vermont,
and never elsewhere. He was nearly seven feet high,
walked as if every joint in his body was in a hopeless
state of dislocation, and was hideously, ludicrously,
and painfully ugly. This whimsical exterior contained
the conscious spirit of Apollo, and the poetical
susceptibility of Keats. He had left his plough in the
green mountains at the age of twenty-five, and entered
as a poor student at the University, where, with the
usual policy of the college government, he was allotted
to me as a compulsory chum, on the principle of
breaking in a colt with a cart-horse. I began with
laughing at him, and ended with loving him. He
rejoiced in the common appellation of Job Smith—a
synonymous soubriquet, as I have elsewhere remarked,
which was substituted by his classmates for his baptismal
name of Forbearance.
Getting Job away with infinite difficulty from a
young Indian girl who was selling moccasins in the
eighteen, stepping about like a young leopard, cold,
stern, and beautiful,) we crossed the outlet of Lake
Erie at the ferry, and took horses on the northern
bank of Niagara river to ride to the Falls. It was a
noble stream, as broad as the Hellespont and as blue
as the sky, and I could not look at it, hurrying on
headlong to its fearful leap, without a feeling almost
of dread.
There was only one thing to which Job was more
susceptible than to the beauties of nature, and that
was the beauty of woman. His romance had been
stirred by the lynx-eyed Sioux, who took her money
for the moccasins with such haughty and thankless
superbia, and full five miles of the river, with all the
gorgeous flowers and rich shrubs upon its rim, might
as well have been Lethe for his admiration. He rode
along, like the man of rags you see paraded on an ass
in the carnival, his legs and arms dangling about in
ludicrous obedience to the sidelong hitch of his pacer.
The roar of the Falls was soon audible, and Job's
enthusiasm and my own, if the increased pace of our
Naragansett ponies meant any thing, were fully
aroused. The river broke into rapids, foaming furiously
on its course, and the subterranean thunder increased
like a succession of earthquakes, each louder
than the last. I had never heard a sound so broad
and universal. It was impossible not to suspend the
breath, and feel absorbed, to the exclusion of all other
thoughts, in the great phenomenon with which the
world seemed trembling to its centre. A tall, misty
cloud, changing its shape continually, as it felt the
shocks of the air, rose up before us, and with our eyes
fixed upon it, and our horses at a hard gallop, we found
ourselves unexpectedly in front of a vast white —
hotel! which suddenly interposed between the cloud
of his panting beast, and urged him on, but a long
fence on either side the immense building cut him off
from all approach; and having assured ourselves that
there was no access to Niagara except through the
back-door of the gentleman's house, who stood with hat
off to receive us, we wished no good to his Majesty's
province of Upper Canada, and dismounted.
“Will you visit the Falls before dinner, gentlemen?”
asked mine host.
“No, sir!” thundered Job, in a voice that, for a moment,
stopped the roar of the cataract.
He was like an improvisatore who had been checked
by some rude birbone in the very crisis of his eloquence.
He would not have gone to the Falls that
night to have saved the world. We dined.
As it was the first meal we had ever eaten under a
monarchy, I proposed the health of the king; but Job
refused it. There was an impertinent profanity, he
said, in fencing up the entrance to Niagara that was a
greater encroachment on natural liberty than the stamp
act. He would drink to no king or parliament under
which such a thing could be conceived possible. I
left the table and walked to the window.
“Job, come here! Miss —, by all that is lovely!”
He flounced up, like a snake touched with a torpedo,
and sprang to the window. Job had never seen
the lady whose name produced such a sensation, but
he had heard more of her than of Niagara. So had
every soul of the fifteen millions of inhabitants between
us and the Gulf of Mexico. She was one of those miracles
of nature that occur, perhaps, once in the rise
and fall of an empire—a woman of the perfect beauty
of an angel, with the most winning human sweetness
of character and manner. She was kind, playful, unaffected,
and radiantly, gloriously beautiful. I am sorry
times she would have been a character of history.
Every body who has been in America, however,
will know whom I am describing, and I am sorry for
those who have not. The country of Washington
will be in its decadence before it sees such another.
She had been to the Fall and was returning with
her mother and a troop of lovers, who, I will venture
to presume, brought away a very imperfect impression
of the scene. I would describe her as she came laughing
up that green bank, unconscious of every thing
but the pleasure of life in a summer sunset; but I
leave it for a more skilful hand. The authoress of
“Hope Leslie” will, perhaps, mould her image into
one of her inimitable heroines.
I presented my friend, and we passed the evening
in her dangerous company. After making an engagement
to accompany her in the morning behind the
sheet of the Fall, we said good night at twelve—one
of us at least as many “fathom deep in love” as a thousand
Rosalinds. My poor chum! The roar of the
cataract that shook the very roof over thy head was
less loud to thee that night than the beating of thine
own heart, I warrant me!
I rose at sunrise to go alone to the Fall, but Job was
before me, and the angular outline of his gaunt figure,
stretching up from Table Rock in strong relief against
the white body of the spray, was the first object that
caught my eye as I descended.
As I came nearer the Fall, a feeling of disappointment
came over me. I had imagined Niagara a vast
body of water descending as if from the clouds. The
approach to most Falls is from below, and we get an
idea of them as of rivers pitching down to the plain
from the brow of a hill or mountain. Niagara river,
on the contrary, comes out from Lake Erie through a
below the level of the country around, consequently
invisible from any considerable distance. You walk
to the bank of a broad and rapid river, and look over
the edge of a rock, where the outlet flood of an inland
sea seems to have broken through the crust of the earth,
and, by its mere weight, plunged with an awful leap
into an immeasurable and resounding abyss. It seems
to strike and thunder upon the very centre of the world,
and the ground beneath your feet quivers with the
shock till you feel unsafe upon it.
Other disappointment than this I cannot conceive
at Niagara. It is a spectacle so awful, so beyond the
scope and power of every other phenomenon in the
world, that I think people who are disappointed there
mistake the incapacity of their own conception for the
want of grandeur in the scene.
The “hell of waters” below need but a little red
ochre to out-Phlegethon Phlegethon. I can imagine
the surprise of the gentle element, after sleeping away
a se'nnight of moonlight in the peaceful bosom of Lake
Erie, at finding itself of a sudden in such a coil! A
Mediterranean sea-gull, which had tossed out the whole
of a January in the infernal “yeast” of the Archipelago,
(was I not all but wrecked every day between Troy
and Malta in a score of successive hurricanes?)—I say,
the most weather beaten of sea-birds would look twice
before he ventured upon the roaring cauldron below
Niagara. It is astonishing to see how far the descending
mass is driven under the surface of the stream.
As far down towards Lake Ontario as the eye can
reach, the immense volumes of water rise like huge
monsters to the light, boiling and flashing out in rings
of foam, with an appearance of rage and anger that I
have seen in no other cataract in the world.
“A nice Fall, as an Englishman would say, my
dear Job.”
“Awful!”
Halleck, the American poet, (a better one never
“strung pearls,”) has written some admirable verses
on Niagara, describing its effect on the different individuals
of a mixed party, among whom was a tailor.
The sea of incident that has broken over me in years
of travel, has washed out of my memory all but
the two lines descriptive of its impression upon
Snip:—
Gods! what a place to sponge a coat!”
“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?”
“How slowly and solemnly they drop into the
abysm!”
It was not an original remark of Mr. Smith's. Nothing
is so surprising to the observer as the extraordinary
deliberateness with which the waters of Niagara
take their tremendous plunge. All hurry and foam
and fret, till they reach the smooth limit of the curve
—and then the laws of gravitation seem suspended,
and, like Cæsar, they pause, and determine, since it is
inevitable, to take the death-leap with becoming dignity.
“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?” I was obliged to
raise my voice to be heard, to a pitch rather exhausting
to an empty stomach.
His eyes remained fixed upon the shifting rainbows
bending and vanishing in the spray. There was no
moving him, and I gave in for another five minutes.
“Do you think it probable, Job, that the waters of
Niagara strike on the axis of the world?”
No answer.
“Job!”
“What?”
“Do you think his Majesty's half of the cataract
is finer than ours?”
“Much.”
“For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the delicious
verdure on the American shore, the glorious
trees, the mass'd foliage, the luxuriant growth even to
the very rim of the ravine! By Jove! it seems to me
things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a
more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand
upon.”
“How exquisitely,” said Job, soliloquising, “that
small green island divides the Fall! What a rock it
must be founded on, not to have been washed away
in the ages that these waters have split against it!”
“I'll lay you a bet it is washed away before the year
two thousand—payable in any currency with which
we may then be conversant.”
“Don't trifle!”
“With time, or geology, do you mean? Isn't it
perfectly clear from the looks of that ravine, that
Niagara has back'd up all the way from Lake Ontario?
These rocks are not adamant, and the very
precipice[1]
you stand on has cracked, and looks ready
for the plunge. It must gradually wear back to Lake
Erie, and then there will be a sweep, I should like to
live long enough to see. The instantaneous junction
of two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in
their levels, will be a spectacle—eh, Job?”
“Tremendous!”
“Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you
come to breakfast?”
He was immovable. I left him on the rock, went
up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee,
waiters a dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens.
He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite,
and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet
Miss —, as she stepped like Aurora from her chamber.
It is necessary to a reputation for prowess in the
United States to have been behind the sheet of the
Fall (supposing you to have been to Niagara.) This
achievement is equivalent to a hundred shower-baths,
one severe cold, and being drowned twice—but most
people do it.
We descended to the bottom of the precipice, at the
side of the Fall, where we found a small house, furnished
with coarse linen dresses for the purpose, and
having arranged ourselves in habiliments not particularly
improving to our natural beauty, we re-appeared
—only three out of a party of ten having had the
courage to trust their attractions to such a trial.
Miss — looked like a fairy in disguise, and Job like
the most ghostly and diabolical monster that ever
stalked unsepultured abroad. He would frighten a
child in his best black suit—but with a pair of wet
linen trowsers scarce reaching to his knees, a jacket
with sleeves shrunk to the elbows, and a white cap,
he was something supernaturally awful. The guide
hesitated about going under the Fall with him.
It looked rather appalling. Our way lay through a
dense descending sheet of water, along a slender pathway
of rocks, broken into small fragments, with an
overhanging wall on one side, and the boiling cauldron
of the cataract on the other. A false step, and
you were a subject for the “shocking accident”
maker.
The guide went first, taking Miss —'s right hand.
She gave me her left, and Job brought up the rear, as
picked our way boldly up to the water. The wall
leaned over so much, and the fragmented declivity
was so narrow and steep, that if it had not been done
before, I should have turned back at once. Two
steps more and the small hand in mine began to struggle
violently, and, in the same instant, the torrent beat
into my mouth, eyes and nostrils, and I felt as if I
was drowning. I staggered a blind step onward, but
still the water poured into my nostrils, and the conviction
rushed for a moment on my mind that we were
lost. I struggled for breath, stumbled forward, and,
with a gasp, that I thought was my last, sunk upon
the rocks within the descending waters. Job tumbled
over me the next instant, and as soon as I could clear
my eyes sufficiently to look about me, I saw the
guide sustaining Miss —, who had been as nearly
drowned as most of the subjects of the Humane Society,
but was apparently in a state of resuscitation.
None but the half-drowned know the pleasure of
breathing.
Here we were within a chamber that Undine might
have coveted, a wall of rock at our back, and a transparent
curtain of shifting water between us and the
world, having entitled ourselves à peu près to the same
reputation with Hylas and Leander, for seduction by
the Naiads.
Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there, we could
but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode. A
lofty and well-lighted hall, shaped like a long pavilion,
extended as far as we could see through the spray, and
with the two objections, that you could not have heard
a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the floor
was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce imagine a
more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who was disgusted
with the world, and subject to dryness of the
of the Witch of Atlas, where, Shelley tells us,
A silver music on the mossy lawn.”
subject to rheumatism.
The air was scarcely breathable—(if air it may be
called, which streams down the face with the density
of a shower from a watering-pot,) and our footing upon
the slippery rocks was so insecure, that the exertion of
continually wiping our eyes was attended with imminent
danger. Our sight was valuable, for, surely,
never was such a brilliant curtain hung up to the sight
of mortals, as spread apparently from the zenith to our
feet, changing in thickness and lustre, but with a constant
and resplendent curve. It was what a child
might imagine the arch of the sky to be where it bends
over the edge of the horizon.
The sublime is certainly very much diluted when
one contemplates it with his back to a dripping and
slimy rock, and his person saturated with a continual
supply of water. From a dry window, I think the infernal
writhe and agony of the abyss into which we
were continually liable to slip, would have been as
fine a thing as I have seen in my travels; but I am
free to admit, that, at the moment, I would have exchanged
my experience and all the honour attached
to it, for a dry escape. The idea of drowning back
through that thick column of water, was at least a
damper to enthusiasm. We seemed cut off from the
living. There was a death between us and the vital
air and sunshine.
I was screwing up my courage for the return, when
the guide seized me by the shoulder. I looked around,
and what was my horror to see Miss — standing
rock, with the water pouring over her in torrents, and
a gulf of foam between us, which I could in no way
understand how she had passed over.
She seemed frightened and pale, and the guide explained
to me by signs, (for I could not distinguish a
syllable through the roar of the cataract,) that she had
walked over a narrow ledge, which had broken with
her weight. A long fresh mark upon the rock at the
foot of the precipitous wall, made it sufficiently evident:
her position was most alarming.
I made a sign to her to look well to her feet; for
the little island on which she stood was green with
slime and scarce larger than a hat, and an abyss of full
six feet wide, foaming and unfathomable, raged between
it and the nearest foothold. What was to be
done? Had we a plank, even, there was no possible
hold for the further extremity, and the shape of the
rock was so conical, that its slippery surface evidently
would not hold a rope for a moment. To jump to her,
even if it were possible, would endanger her life, and
while I was smiling and encouraging the beautiful
creature, as she stood trembling and pale on her dangerous
foothold, I felt my very heart sink within me.
The despairing guide said something which I could
not hear, and disappeared through the watery wall, and
I fixed my eyes upon the lovely form, standing, like a
spirit in the misty shroud of the spray, as if the intensity
of my gaze could sustain her upon her dangerous
foothold. I would have given ten years of my life at
that moment to have clasped her hand in mine.
I had scarce thought of Job until I felt him trying
to pass behind me. His hand was trembling as he
laid it on my shoulder to steady his steps; but there
was something in his ill-hewn features that shot an
indefinable ray of hope through my mind. His sandy
dress clung to him like a skin; but though I recall his
image now with a smile, I looked upon him with a feeling
far enough from amusement then. God bless thee,
my dear Job! wherever in this unfit world thy fine
spirit may be fulfilling its destiny!
He crept down carefully to the edge of the foaming
abyss, till he stood with the breaking bubbles at his
knees. I was at a loss to know what he intended.
She surely would not dare to attempt a jump to his
arms from that slippery rock, and to reach her in any
way seemed impossible.
The next instant he threw himself forward, and
while I covered my eyes in horror, with the flashing
conviction that he had gone mad and flung himself
into the hopeless whirlpool to reach her, she had
crossed the awful gulf, and lay trembling and exhausted
at my feet! He had thrown himself over
the chasm, caught the rock barely with the extremities
of his fingers, and with certain death if he missed
his hold or slipped from his uncertain tenure, had
sustained her with supernatural strength as she walked
over his body!
The guide providentially returned with a rope in
the same instant, and, fastening it around one of his
feet, we dragged him back through the whirlpool, and
after a moment or two to recover from the suffocating
immersion, he fell on his knees, and we joined him,
I doubt not devoutly, in his inaudible thanks to God.
It has since fallen into the abyss—fortunately in the night, as visitors
were always upon it during the day. The noise was heard at
an incredible distance.
2. II.—LAKE ONTARIO.
The next bravest achievement to venturing behind
the sheet of Niagara, is to cross the river in a small
boat, at some distance below the Phlegethon of the
abyss. I should imagine it was something like riding
in a howdah on a swimming elephant. The immense
masses of water driven under by the Fall, rise
splashing and fuming far down the river; and they
are as unlike a common wave, to ride, as a horse and
a camel. You are, perhaps, ten or fifteen minutes
pulling across, and you may get two or three of these
lifts, which shove you straight into the air about ten
feet, and then drop you into the cup of an eddy, as
if some long-armed Titan had his hand under the
water, and were tossing you up and down for his
amusement. It imports lovers to take heed how their
mistresses are seated, as all ladies, on these occasions,
throw themselves into the arms of the nearest “hose
and doublet.”
Job and I went over to dine on the American side
and refresh our patriotism. We dined under a hickory-tree
on Goat Island, just over the glassy curve of the
cataract; and as we grew joyous with our champagne,
we strolled up to the point where the waters divide
for the American and British Falls; and Job harangued
the “mistaken gentlemen on his right,” in
eloquence that would have turned a division in the
House of Commons. The deluded multitude, however,
rolled away in crowds for the monarchy, and at
the close of his speech the British Fall was still, by a
melancholy majority, the largest. We walked back
to our bottle like foiled patriots, and soon after, hopeless
of our principles, went over to the other side too!
I advise all people going to Niagara to suspend making
visit. You might as well teach a child the magnitude
of the heavens by pointing to the sky with your
finger, as comprehend Niagara in a day. It has to
create its own mighty place in your mind. You have
no comparison through which it can enter. It is too
vast. The imagination shrinks from it. It rolls in
gradually, thunder upon thunder, and plunge upon
plunge; and the mind labours with it to an exhaustion
such as is created only by the extremest intellectual
effort. I have seen men sit and gaze upon it in a cool
day of autumn, with the perspiration standing on
their foreheads in large beads, from the unconscious
but toilsome agony of its conception. After haunting
its precipices, and looking on its solemn waters for
seven days, sleeping with its wind-played monotony
in your ears, dreaming, and returning to it till it has
grown the one object, as it will, of your perpetual
thought, you feel, all at once, like one who has compassed
the span of some almighty problem. It has
stretched itself within you. Your capacity has attained
the gigantic standard, and you feel an elevation
and breadth of nature that could measure girth and
stature with a seraph. We had fairly “done” Niagara.
We had seen it by sunrise, sunset, moonlight;
from top and bottom; fasting and full; alone and together.
We had learned by heart every green path
on the island of perpetual dew, which is set like an
imperial emerald on its front, (a poetical idea of my
own, much admired by Job,)—we had been grave,
gay, tender, and sublime in its mighty neighbourhood,
we had become so accustomed to the bass of its
broad thunder, that it seemed to us like a natural property
in the air, and we were unconscious of it for
hours; our voices had become so tuned to its key,
and our thoughts so tinged by its grand and perpetual
reach of its vibrations would not agonize us with its
unnatural silence, and the common features of the
world seem of an unutterable and frivolous littleness.
We were eating our last breakfast there, in tender
melancholy:—mine for the Falls, and Job's for the
Falls and Miss —, to whom I had a half suspicion
that he had made a declaration.
“Job!” said I.
He looked up from his egg.
“My dear Job!”
“Don't allude to it, my dear chum,” said he, dropping
his spoon, and rushing to the window to hide his
agitation. It was quite clear.
I could scarce restrain a smile. Psyche in the embrace
of a respectable giraffe would be the first thought
in any body's mind who should see them together.
And yet why should he not woo her—and win her
too? He had saved her life in the extremest peril, at
the most extreme hazard of his own; he had a heart
as high and worthy, and as capable of an undying
worship of her as she would find in a wilderness of
lovers; he felt like a graceful man, and acted like a
brave one, and was sans peur et sans reproche, and
why should he not love like other men? My dear
Job! I fear thou wilt go down to thy grave, and but
one woman in this wide world will have loved thee—
thy mother! Thou art the soul of a preux chevalier
in the body of some worthy grave-digger, who is strutting
about the world, perhaps, in thy more proper carcass.
These angels are so o'er hasty in packing!
We got upon our horses, and had a pleasant amble
before us of fifteen miles, on the British side of the
river. We cantered off stoutly for a mile to settle our
regrets, and then I pulled up, and requested Job to ride
near me, as I had something to say to him.
“You are entering,” said I, “my dear Job, upon your
first journey in a foreign land. You will see other
manners than your own, which are not therefore laughable,
and hear a different pronunciation from your own,
which is not therefore vulgar. You are to mix with
British subjects, whom you have attacked vigorously
in your school declamations as `the enemy,' but who
are not therefore to be bullied in their own country,
and who have certain tastes of their own, upon which
you had better reserve your judgment. We have no
doubt that we are the greatest country that ever was,
is, or ever shall be; but, as this is an unpalatable piece
of information to other nations, we will not stuff it into
their teeth, unless by particular request. John Bull
likes his coat too small. Let him wear it. John Bull
prefers his beefsteak to a fricandeau. Let him eat it.
John Bull will leave no stone unturned to serve you
in his own country, if you will let him. Let him. John
Bull will suffer you to find fault for ever with King,
Lords, and Commons, if you do not compare them invidiously
with other governments. Let the comparison
alone. In short, my dear chum, as we insist that
foreigners should adopt our manners while they are
travelling in the United States, we had better adopt
theirs when we return the visit. They are doubtless
quite wrong throughout, but it is not worth while to
bristle one's back against the opinions of some score
millions.”
The foam disappeared from the stream, as we followed
it on, and the roar of the Falls
Like a ring of bells, whose sound the wind still alters,”
lessened with the increasing distance till it was
lost. Job began to look around him, and see something
road, and the historian of this memorable journey,
who never had but one sorrow that “would not budge
with a fillip,” rose in his stirrups as he descried the
broad blue bosom of Lake Ontario, and gave vent to
his feelings in (he begs the reader to believe) the most
suitable quotation.
Seeing any celebrated water for the first time was
always, to me, an event. River, waterfall, or lake, if
I have heard of it and thought of it for years, has a sensible
presence, that I feel like the approach of a human
being in whom I am interested. My heart flutters to
it. It is thereafter an acquaintance, and I defend its
beauty or its grandeur as I would the fair fame and
worth of a woman that had shown me a preference.
My dear reader, do you love water? Not to drink,
for I own it is detestable in small quantities—but water,
running or falling, sleeping or gliding, tinged by
the sunset glow, or silvered by the gentle alchymist
of the midnight heaven? Do you love a lake? Do
you love a river? Do you “affect” any one laughing
and sparkling brook that has flashed on your eye like
a fay overtaken by the cock-crowing, and tripping away
slily to dream-land? As you see four sisters, and but
one to love; so, in the family of the elements, I have
a tenderness for water.
Lake Ontario spread away to the horizon, glittering
in the summer sun, boundless to the eye as the
Atlantic; and directly beneath us lay the small town
of Fort Niagara, with the steamer at the pier, in which
we promised ourselves a passage down the St. Lawrence.
We rode on to the hotel, which we found to
our surprise crowded with English officers, and having
disposed of our Narragansetts, we inquired the hour
of departure, and what we could eat meantime, in as
nearly the same breath as possible.
“Cold leg of mutton and the steam-boat's engaged,
sir!”
The mercury in Job's Britishometer fell plump to
zero. The idea of a monopoly of the whole steamer
by a colonel and his staff, and no boat again for a
week!
There was a government to live under!
We sat down to our mutton, and presently enter
the waiter.
“Colonel —'s compliments; hearing that two
gentlemen have arrived who expected to go by the
steamer, he is happy to offer them a passage if they
can put up with rather crowded accommodations.”
“Well, Job! what do you think now of England,
politically, morally, and religiously? Has not the
gentlemanlike courtesy of one individual materially
changed your opinions upon every subject connected
with the United Kingdom of Great Britain?”
“It has.”
“Then, my dear Job, I recommend you never
again to read a book of travels without writing down
on the margin of every bilious chapter, `probably lost
his passage in the steamer,' or `had no mustard to his
mutton,' or `could find no ginger-nuts for the interesting
little traveller,' or some similar annotation. Depend
upon it, that dear delightful Mrs. Trollope would
never have written so agreeable a book, if she had
thriven with her bazaar in Cincinnati.”
We paid our respects to the Colonel, and at six
o'clock in the evening got on board. Part of an Irish
regiment was bivouacked on the deck, and happier
fellows I never saw. They had completed their nine
years' service on the three Canadian stations, and
were returning to the ould country, wives, children,
and all. A line was drawn across the deck, reserving
the after quarter for the officers; the sick were
boat, and the band stood ready to play the farewell
air to the cold shores of Upper Canada.
The line was cast off, when a boy of thirteen rushed
down to the pier, and springing on board with a
desperate leap, flew from one end of the deck to the
other, and flung himself at last upon the neck of a
pretty girl sitting on the knee of one of the privates.
“Mary, dear Mary!” was all he could utter. His
sobs choked him.
“Avast with the line, there!” shouted the captain,
who had no wish to carry off this unexpected passenger.
The boat was again swung to the wharf, and
the boy very roughly ordered ashore. His only answer
was to cling closer to the girl, and redouble his tears,
and by this time the Colonel had stepped aft, and the
case seemed sure of a fair trial. The pretty Canadian
dropped her head on her bosom, and seemed divided
between contending emotions, and the soldier stood up
and raised his cap to his commanding officer, but held
firmly by her hand. The boy threw himself on his
knees to the Colonel, but tried in vain to speak.
“Who's this, O'Shane?” asked the officer.
“Sure, my swateheart, your honour.”
“And how dare you bring her on board, sir?”
“Och, she'll go to ould Ireland wid us, your honour.”
“No, no, no!” cried the convulsed boy, clasping
the Colonel's knees, and sobbing as if his heart would
break; “she is my sister! She isn't his wife! Father
'll die if she does! She can't go with him! She
sha'n't go with him!”
Job began to snivel, and I felt warm about the eyes
myself.
“Have you got a wife, O'Shane?” asked the
Colonel.
“Plase your honour, never a bit,” said Paddy. He
was a tight, good-looking fellow, by the way, as you
would wish to see.
“Well—we'll settle this thing at once. Get up, my
little fellow! Come here, my good girl! Do you
love O'Shane well enough to be his wife?”
“Indeed I do, sir!” said Mary, wiping her eyes
with the back of her hand, and stealing a look at the
“six feet one” that stood as straight as a pike beside
her.
“O'Shane! I allow this girl to go with us only on
condition that you marry her at the first place where
we can find a priest. We will make her up a bit of a
dowry, and I will look after her comfort as long as
she follows the regiment. What do you say, sir?
Will you marry her?”
O'Shane began to waver in his military position,
from a full front face getting to very nearly a right-about.
It was plain he was taken by surprise. The
eyes of the company were on him, however, and public
opinion, which, in most human breasts, is considerably
stronger than conscience, had its effect.
“I'll do it, your honour!” said he, bolting it out as
a man volunteers upon a “forlorn hope.”
Tears might as well have been bespoken for the
whole company. The boy was torn from his sister's
neck, and set ashore in the arms of two sailors, and
poor Mary, very much in doubt whether she was
happy or miserable, sank upon a heap of knapsacks,
and buried her eyes in a cotton handkerchief with a
map of London upon it, probably a gage d'amour
from the desaving O'Shane. I did the same myself
with a silk one, and Job item. Item the Colonel and
several officers.
The boat was shoved off, and the wheels spattered
away, but as far as we could hear his voice, the cry
came following on, “Mary, Mary!”
It rung in my ears all night: “Mary, Mary!”
I was up in the morning at sunrise, and was glad
to escape from the confined cabin and get upon deck.
The steamer was booming on through a sea as calm
as a mirror, and no land visible. The fresh dewiness
of the morning air ashore played in my nostrils, and
the smell of grass was perceptible in the mind, but in
all else it was like a calm in mid ocean. The soldiers
were asleep along the decks, with their wives
and children, and the pretty runaway lay with her
head on O'Shane's bosom, her red eyes and soiled
finery showing too plainly how she had passed the
night. Poor Mary! she has enough of following a
soldier, by this, I fear.
I stepped forward, and was not a little surprised to
see standing against the railing on the larboard bow,
the motionless figure of an Indian girl of sixteen.
Her dark eye was fixed on the line of the horizon we
were leaving behind, her arms were folded on her
bosom, and she seemed not even to breathe. A common
shawl was wrapped carelessly around her, and
another glance betrayed to me that she was in a situation
soon to become a mother. Her feet were protected
by a pair of once gaudy but now shabby and
torn moccasins, singularly small; her hands were of a
delicate thinness unusual to her race, and her hollow
cheeks, and forehead marked with an expression of
pain, told all I could have prophesied of the history of
a white man's tender mercies. I approached very
near, quite unperceived. A small burning spot was
just perceptible in the centre of her dark cheek, and
as I looked at her steadfastly, I could see a working of
the muscles of her dusky brow, which betrayed, in
one of a race so trained to stony calmness, an unusual
fever of feeling. I looked around for the place in
which she must have slept. A mantle of wampum-work,
occupied as a pillow by a brutal-looking and sleeping
soldier, told at once the main part of her story. I felt
for her, from my soul!
“You can hear the great waterfall no more,” I said,
touching her arm.
“I hear it when I think of it,” she replied, turning
her eyes upon me as slowly, and with as little surprise,
as if I had been talking to her an hour.
I pointed to the sleeping soldier. “Are you going
with him to his country?”
“Yes.”
“Are you his wife?”
“My father gave me to him.”
“Has he sworn before the priest in the name of the
Great Spirit to be your husband?”
“No.” She looked intently into my eyes as she
answered, as if she tried in vain to read my meaning.
“Is he kind to you?”
She smiled bitterly.
“Why then did you follow him?”
Her eyes dropped upon the burden she bore at her
heart. The answer could not have been clearer if
written with a sunbeam. I said a few words of kindness,
and left her to turn over in my mind how I
could best interfere for her happiness.
3. III.—THE ST. LAWRENCE.
On the third evening we had entered upon the St.
Lawrence, and were winding cautiously into the
channel of the Thousand Isles. I think there is not,
within the knowledge of the “all-beholding sun,” a
the Mississippi and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, I know
there is not, for I have pic-nic'd from the Symplegades
westward. The Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence
are as imprinted on my mind as the stars of heaven.
I could forget them as soon.
The river is here as wide as a lake, while the channel
just permits the passage of a steamer. The
islands, more than a thousand in number, are a singular
formation of flat, rectangular rock, split, as it
were, by regular mathematical fissures, and overflowed
nearly to the tops, which are loaded with a
most luxuriant vegetation. They vary in size, but
the generality of them would about accommodate a
tea-party of six. The water is deep enough to float
a large steamer directly at the edge, and an active deer
would leap across from one to the other in any direction.
What is very singular, these little rocky platforms
are covered with a rich loam, and carpeted with
moss and flowers, while immense trees take root in the
clefts, and interlace their branches with those of the
neighbouring islets, shadowing the water with the
unsunned dimness of the wilderness. It is a very odd
thing to glide through in a steamer. The luxuriant
leaves sweep the deck, and the black funnel parts the
drooping sprays as it keeps its way, and you may
pluck the blossoms of the acacia, or the rich chestnut
flowers, sitting on the taffrail, and, really, a magic passage
in a witch's steamer, beneath the tree-tops of an
untrodden forest, could not be more novel and startling.
Then the solitude and silence of the dim and
still waters are continually broken by the plunge and
leap of the wild deer springing or swimming from one
island to another, and the swift and shadowy canoe of
the Indian glides out from some unseen channel, and
with a single stroke of his broad paddle he vanishes,
and nature-searching spirit of Keats is abroad in the
world, “my basnet to a 'prentice-cap” he passes his
summers amid the Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence!
I would we were there with our tea-things,
sweet Rosa Matilda!
We had dined on the quarter-deck, and were sitting
over the colonel's wine, pulling the elm-leaves from
the branches as they swept saucily over the table, and
listening to the band, who were playing waltzes that
probably ended in the confirmed insanity of every
wild heron and red deer that happened that afternoon
to come within ear-shot of the good steamer Queenston.
The paddles began to slacken in their spattering,
and the boat came to, at the sharp side of one of the
largest of the shadowy islands. We were to stop an
hour or two, and take in wood.
Every body was soon ashore for a ramble, leaving
only the colonel, who was a cripple from a score of
Waterloo tokens, and your servant, reader, who had
something on his mind.
“Colonel! will you oblige me by sending for Mahoney?
Steward! call me that Indian girl sitting
with her head on her knees in the boat's bow.”
They stood before us.
“How is this?” exclaimed the Colonel; “another!
Good God! these Irishmen! Well, sir! what do you
intend to do with this girl, now that you have ruined
her?”
Mahoney looked at her out of a corner of his eye
with a libertine contempt that made my blood boil.
The girl watched for his answer with an intense but
calm gaze into his face, that if he had had a soul,
would have killed him. Her lips were set firmly but
not fiercely together, and as the private stood looking
from one side to the other, unable or unwilling to answer,
and turned her look on the commanding officer with
a proud coldness that would have become Medea.
“Mahoney!” said the colonel, sternly, “will you
marry this poor girl?”
“Never, I hope, your honor!”
The wasted and noble creature raised her burdened
form to its fullest height, and, with an inaudible murmur
bursting from her lips, walked back to the bow
of the vessel. The colonel pursued his conversation
with Mahoney, and the obstinate brute was still refusing
the only reparation he could make the poor
Indian, when she suddenly re-appeared. The shawl
was no longer around her shoulders. A coarse blanket
was bound below her breast with a belt of wampum,
leaving her fine bust entirely bare, her small feet trod
the deck with the elasticity of a leopard about to leap
on his prey, and her dark, heavily fringed eyes glowed
like coals of fire. She seized the colonel's hand, and
imprinted a kiss upon it, another upon mine, and without
a look at the father of her child, dived with a
single leap over the gangway. She rose directly in
the clear water, swam with powerful strokes to one of
the most distant islands, and turning once more to
wave her hand as she stood on the shore, strode on,
and was lost in the tangles of the forest.
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