University of Virginia Library

6. VI.
NIAGARA.

As the train stopped,
Isabel's heart beat
with a child-like exultation,
as I believe
every one's heart
must who is worthy
to arrive at Niagara.
She had been trying
to fancy, from time to
time, that she heard
the roar of the cataract,
and now, when
she alighted from the
car, she was sure she
should have heard it
but for the vulgar little noises that attend the arrival
of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere
else. “Never mind, dearest; you shall be stunned
with it before you leave,” promised her husband;
and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode through the
quaint streets of the village, where it remains a
question whether the lowliness of the shops and private
houses makes the hotels look so vast, or the

bigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings.
The immense caravansaries swelling up from among
the little bazaars (where they sell feather fans, and
miniature bark canoes, and jars and vases and
bracelets and brooches carved out of the local
rocks), made our friends with their trunks very
conscious of their disproportion to the accommodations
of the smallest. They were the sole occupants
of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed
to be received at their hotel with a burst of minstrelsy
from a whole band of music. Isabel felt
that a single stringed instrument of some timid
note would have been enough; and Basil was going
to express his own modest preference for a
jew's-harp, when the music ceased with a sudden
clash of the cymbals. But the next moment it
burst out with fresh sweetness, and in alighting
they perceived that another omnibus had turned
the corner and was drawing up to the pillared portico
of the hotel. A small family dismounted, and
the feet of the last had hardly touched the pavement
when the music again ended as abruptly as
those flourishes of trumpets that usher player-kings
upon the stage. Isabel could not help laughing at
this melodious parsimony. “I hope they don't let
on the cataract and shut it off in this frugal style;
do they, Basil?” she asked, and passed jesting
through a pomp of unoccupied porters and call-boys.
Apparently there were not many people
stopping at this hotel, or else they were all out
looking at the Falls or confined to their rooms.
However, our travellers took in the almost weird
emptiness of the place with their usual gratitude to
fortune for all queerness in life, and followed to the
pleasant quarters assigned them. There was time
before supper for a glance at the cataract, and after
a brief toilet they sallied out again upon the holiday
street, with its parade of gay little shops, and
thence passed into the grove beside the Falls, enjoying
at every instant their feeling of arrival at a sublime
destination.

In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank
with Rome, the metropolis of history and religion;
with Venice, the chief city of sentiment and fantasy.
In either you are at once made at home by
a perception of its greatness, in which there is no
quality of aggression, as there always seems to be
in minor places as well as in minor men, and you
gratefully accept its sublimity as a fact in no way
contrasting with your own insignificance.

Our friends were beset of course by many carriage-drivers,
whom they repelled with the kindly
firmness of experienced travel. Isabel even felt a
compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Niagara
so much as to have forgotten that the first
time one must see it alone or only with the next of
friendship. She was voluble in her pity of Basil
that it was not as new to him as to her, till between
the trees they saw a white cloud of spray,
shot through and through with sunset, rising, rising,

and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten
down by the diapason of the cataract.

I am not sure but the first emotion on viewing
Niagara is that of familiarity. Ever after, its
strangeness increases; but in that earliest moment,
when you stand by the side of the American fall,
and take in so much of the whole as your glance
can compass, an impression of having seen it often
before is certainly very vivid. This may be an
effect of that grandeur which puts you at your
ease in its presence; but it also undoubtedly results
in part from lifelong acquaintance with every
variety of futile picture of the scene. You have its
outward form clearly in your memory; the shores,
the rapids, the islands, the curve of the Falls, and
the stout rainbow with one end resting on their top
and the other lost in the mists that rise from the
gulf beneath. On the whole I do not account this
sort of familiarity a misfortune. The surprise is
none the less a surprise because it is kept till the
last, and the marvel, making itself finally felt in
every nerve, and not at once through a single
sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as if
Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred
to win your heart with her beauty; and so Isabel,
who was instinctively prepared for the reverse,
suffered a vague disappointment, for a little instant,
as she looked along the verge from the water
that caressed the shore at her feet before it flung
itself down, to the wooded point that divides the

American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which
showed dimly through its veil of golden and silver
mists the emerald wall of the great Horse-Shoe.
“How still it is!” she said, amidst the roar that
shook the ground under their feet and made the
leaves tremble overhead, and “How lonesome!”
amidst the people lounging and sauntering about in
every direction among the trees. In fact that prodigious
presence does make a solitude and silence
round every spirit worthy to perceive it, and it
gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that
the rocks and pebbles in the water's edge, and the
weeds and grasses that nod above it, have a value
far beyond that of such common things elsewhere.
In all the aspects of Niagara there seems a grave
simplicity, which is perhaps a reflection of the
spectator's soul for once utterly dismantled of affectation
and convention. In the vulgar reaction from
this, you are of course as trivial, if you like, at
Niagara, as anywhere.

Slowly Isabel became aware that the sacred
grove beside the fall was profaned by some very
common presences indeed, that tossed bits of stone
and sticks into the consecrated waters, and struggled
for handkerchiefs and fans, and here and there
put their arms about each other's waists, and made
a show of laughing and joking. They were a picnic
purty of rude, silly folks of the neighborhood,
and she stood pondering them in sad wonder if
anything could be worse, when she heard a voice

saying to Basil, “Take you next, Sir? Plenty of
light yet, and the wind 's down the river, so the
spray won't interfere. Make a capital picture of
you; falls in the background.” It was the local
photographer urging them to succeed the young
couple he had just posed at the brink: the gentleman
was sitting down, with his legs crossed and his
hands elegantly disposed; the lady was standing
at his side, with one arm thrown lightly across his
shoulder, while with the other hand she thrust his
cane into the ground; you could see it was going to
be a splendid photograph.

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trusting
as usual to his sympathy for perception of her
train of thought, “Well, I'll never try to be high-strung
again. But shouldn't you have thought,
dearest, that I might expect to be high-strung with
success at Niagara if anywhere?” She passively
followed him into the long, queer, downward-sloping
edifice on the border of the grove, unflinchingly
mounted the car that stood ready, and descended
the incline. Emerging into the light again, she
found herself at the foot of the fall by whose top
she had just stood.

At first she was glad there were other people
down there, as if she and Basil were not enough to
bear it alone, and she could almost have spoken to
the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasols and
impertinent little boots, whom their attendant husbands
were helping over the sharp and slippery

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 125. In-line Illustration. Image of people looking at Niagara falls from rocks below.] rocks, so bare beyond the spray, so green and
mossy within the fall of mist. But in another
breath she forgot them, as she looked on that dizzied
sea, hurling itself from the high summit in
huge white knots, and breaks and masses, and
plunging into the gulf beside her, while it sent
continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and
crawled away in vast eddies, with somehow a look
of human terror, bewilderment, and pain. It was
bathed in snowy vapor to its crest, but now and
then heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they
saw the outline of the Falls almost as far as the
Canada side. They remembered afterwards how
they were able to make use of but one sense at a
time, and how when they strove to take in the
forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear
it; but as soon as they released their eyes from
this service, every fibre in them vibrated to the
sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it.
They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness
in their senses, and of a tendency of each to palter
with the things perceived. The eye could no
longer take truthful note of quality, and now beheld
the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of carven
marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of
lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms, and
scarce so much cohesion as would hold them together;
and again they could not discern if this
course were from above or from beneath, whether
the water rose from the abyss or dropped from the
height. The ear could give the brain no assurance
of the sound that filled it, and whether it were
great or little; the prevailing softness of the cataract's
tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious
force or of prodigious volume. It was only
when the sight, so idle in its own behalf, came to
the aid of the other sense, and showed them the
mute movement of each other's lips, that they
dimly appreciated the depth of sound that involved
them.

“I think you might have been high-strung there,
for a second or two,” said Basil, when, ascending
the incline, he could make himself heard. “We
will try the bridge next.”

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and
delicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls they
have in late years woven a web of wire high in air,
and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of
all the bridges made with hands it seems the lightest,
most ethereal; it is ideally graceful, and droops
from its slight towers like a garland. It is worthy
to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara,
and to show the traveller the vast spectacle,
from the beginning of the American Fall to
the farthest limit of the Horse-Shoe, with all the
awful pomp of the rapids, the solemn darkness of
the wooded islands, the mystery of the vaporous
gulf, the indomitable wildness of the shores, as far
as the eye can reach up or down the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by a
path that led through another of those groves
which keep the village back from the shores of the

river on the American side, and greatly help the
sight-seer's pleasure in the place. The exquisite
structure, which sways so tremulously from its
towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth
where its cables sink into the ground, is to other
bridges what the blood horse is to the common
breed of roadsters; and now they felt its sensitive
nerves quiver under them and sympathetically
through them as they advanced farther and farther
toward the centre. Perhaps their sympathy with
the bridge's trepidation was too great for unalloyed
delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be
known only there; and afterwards, at least, they
would not have had their airy path seem more
secure.

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that
sprung from the base of the Falls with a mournful,
tremulous grace, and a movement weird as the
play of the northern lights. They were touched
with the most delicate purples and crimsons, that
darkened to deep red, and then faded from them at
a second look, and they flew upward, swiftly upward,
like troops of pale, transparent ghosts; while
a perfectly clear radiance, better than any other
for local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under
the bridge the river smoothly swam, the undercurrents
forever unfolding themselves upon the surface
with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all round
with faint lines of white, where the air that filled
the water freed itself in foam. What had been

clear green on the face of the cataract was here
more like rich verd-antique, and had a look of
firmness almost like that of the stone itself. So
it showed beneath the bridge, and down the river
till the curving shores hid it. These, springing
abruptly from the water's brink, and shagged with
pine and cedar, displayed the tender verdure of
grass and bushes intermingled with the dark evergreens
that climb from ledge to ledge, till they
point their speary tops above the crest of bluffs.
In front, where tumbled rocks and expanses of
naked clay varied the gloomier and gayer green,
sprung those spectral mists; and through them
loomed out, in its manifold majesty, Niagara, with
the seemingly immovable white Gothic screen of
the American Fall, and the green massive curve of
the Horse-Shoe, solid and simple and calm as an
Egyptian wall; while behind this, with their white
and black expanses broken by dark foliaged little
isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed down between
their heavily wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not
how long, in rapture on the sight; and then, looking
back from the shore to the spot where they had
stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess
itself of all, and that the bridge should swing
there in mid-air like a filmy web, scarce more passable
than the rainbow that flings its arch above the
mists.

On the portico of the hotel they found half a

score of gentlemen smoking, and creating together
that collective silence which passes for sociality on
our continent. Some carriages stood before the
door, and within, around the base of a pillar, sat a
circle of idle call-boys. There were a few trunks
heaped together in one place, with a porter standing
guard over them; a solitary guest was buying
a cigar at the newspaper stand in one corner;
another friendless creature was writing a letter
in the reading-room; the clerk, in a seersucker
coat and a lavish shirt-bosom, tried to give the
whole an effect of watering-place gayety and bustle,
as he provided a newly arrived guest with a
room.

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and
repose with indifference. If the hotel had been
thronged with brilliant company, they would have
been no more and no less pleased; and when,
after supper, they came into the grand parlor, and
found nothing there but a marble-topped centre-table,
with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small
company of goblets, they sat down perfectly content
in a secluded window-seat. They were not
seen by the three people who entered soon after,
and halted in the centre of the room.

“Why, Kitty!” said one of the two ladies who
must be in any travelling-party of three, “this is
more inappropriate to your gorgeous array than the
supper-room, even.”

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for social

conquest, in some kind of airy evening-dress,
and was looking round with bewilderment upon
that forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery.
She owned, with a smile, that she had not seen so
much of the world yet as she had been promised;
but she liked Niagara very much, and perhaps they
should find the world at breakfast.

“No,” said the other lady, who was as unquiet
as Kitty was calm, and who seemed resolved to
make the most of the worst, “it isn't probable
that the hotel will fill up overnight; and I feel
personally responsible for this state of things.
Who would ever have supposed that Niagara
would be so empty? I thought the place was
thronged the whole summer long. How do you
account for it, Richard?”

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-continued
discussion elsewhere of the matter in
hand, and he said that he had not been trying to
account for it.

“Then you don't care for Kitty's pleasure at all,
and you don't want her to enjoy herself. Why
don't you take some interest in the matter?”

“Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Niagara
in the most satisfactory way, it wouldn't
add a soul to the floating population. Under the
circumstances I prefer to leave it unexplained.”

“Do you think it 's because it 's such a hot summer?
Do you suppose it 's not exactly the season?
Didn't you expect there'd be more people? Perhaps
Niagara isn't as fashionable as it used to be.”

“It looks something like that.”

“Well, what under the sun do you think is the
reason?”

“I don't know.”

“Perhaps,” interposed Kitty, placidly, “most
of the visitors go to the other hotel, now.”

“It 's altogether likely,” said the other lady,
eagerly. “There are just such caprices.”

“Well,” said Richard, “I wanted you to go
there.”

“But you said that you always heard this was
the most fashionable.”

“I know it. I didn't want to come here for
that reason. But fortune favors the brave.”

“Well, it 's too bad! Here we've asked Kitty
to come to Niagara with us, just to give her a little
peep into the world, and you've brought us to a
hotel where we're” —

“Monarchs of all we survey,” suggested Kitty.

“Yes, and start at the sound of our own,” added
the other lady, helplessly.

“Come now, Fanny,” said the gentleman, who
was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker.
“You know you insisted, against all I could say or
do, upon coming to this house; I implored you to
go to the other, and now you blame me for bringing
you here.”

“So I do. If you'd let me have my own way
without opposition about coming here, I dare say I
should have gone to the other place. But never

mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope.
She 's your cousin,”

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently
folded in her lap. She now rose and said that she
did not know anything about the other hotel, and
perhaps it was just as empty as this.

“It can't be. There can't be two hotels so
empty,” said Fanny. “It don't stand to reason.”

“If you wish Kitty to see the world so much,”
said the gentleman, “why don't you take her on to
Quebec, with us?”

Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was
moving with a listless content about the parlor.

“I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know
she 's only come for the night, and has nothing with
her but a few cuffs and collars! I certainly never
heard of anything so absurd before!”

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its
charm upon her, for, after a silence, “I could lend
her some things,” she said musingly. “But don't
speak of it to-night, please. It 's too ridiculous.
Kitty!” she called out, and, as the young lady
drew near, she continued, “How would you like to
go to Quebec, with us?”

“O Fanny!” cried Kitty, with rapture; and
then, with dismay, “How can I?”

“Why, very well, I think. You've got this
dress, and your travelling-suit; and I can lend you
whatever you want. Come!” she added joyously,
“let 's go up to your room, and talk it over!”

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and
the gentleman followed. To their own relief the
guiltless eaves-droppers, who found no moment
favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy
began, issued from their retiracy.

“What a remarkable little lady!” said Basil,
eagerly turning to Isabel for sympathy in his enjoyment
of her inconsequence.

“Yes, poor thing!” returned his wife; “it 's no
light matter to invite a young lady to take a journey
with you, and promise her all sorts of gayety,
and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find
her on your hands in a desolation like this. It 's
dreadful, I think.”

Basil stared. “O, certainly,” he said. “But
what an amusingly illogical little body!”

“I don't understand what you mean, Basil. It
was the only thing that she could do, to invite the
young lady to go on with them. I wonder her
husband had the sense to think of it first. Of course
she'll have to lend her things.”

“And you didn't observe anything peculiar in
her way of reaching her conclusions?”

“Peculiar? What do you mean?”

“Why, her blaming her husband for letting her
have her own way about the hotel; and her telling
him not to mention his proposal to Kitty, and then
doing it herself, just after she'd pronounced it absurd
and impossible.” He spoke with heat at being
forced to make what he thought a needless explanation.

“O!” said Isabel, after a moment's reflection.
“That! Did you think it so very odd?”

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a
man must feel when he begins to perceive that he
has married the whole mystifying world of womankind
in the woman of his choice, and made no answer.
But to his own soul he said: “I supposed I
had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance. It
seems I have been flattering myself.”

The next morning they went out as they had
planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after an
early breakfast. As they sauntered through the
village's contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture,
they praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday
character of the place, enjoying equally the
lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers and
their carriages to let, and the little shops, with
nothing but mementos of Niagara, and Indian bead-work,
and other trumpery, to sell. Shops so useless,
they agreed, could not be found outside the
Palais Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere
else in the world but here. They felt themselves
once more a part of the tide of mere sight-seeing
pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in
other days, and in an eddy of which their love itself
had opened its white blossom, and lily-like
dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of
newly wedded bliss, which, involving the whole
land during the season of bridal-tours, may be said

to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly
jewel of a precious ring. The place is, in fact,
almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one
out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien
there, and must discern a certain immodesty in his
intrusion. Is it for his profane eyes to look upon
all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of
any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing
his excuses to the collective rapture, take the
first train for the wicked outside world to which he
belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and brides.
Three or four with the benediction still on them,
come down in the same car with him; he hands her
travelling-shawl after one as she springs from the
omnibus into her husband's arms; there are two or
three walking back and forth with their new lords
upon the porch of the hotel; at supper they are on
every side of him, and he feels himself suffused, as it
were, by a roseate atmosphere of youth and love
and hope. At breakfast it is the same, and then, in
his wanderings about the place he constantly meets
them. They are of all manners of beauty, fair and
dark, slender and plump, tall and short; but they
are all beautiful with the radiance of loving and
being loved. Now, if ever in their lives, they are
charmingly dressed, and ravishing toilets take the
willing eye from the objects of interest. How high
the heels of the pretty boots, how small the tender-tinted
gloves, how electrical the flutter of the snowy
skirts! What is Niagara to these things?

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sisterhood
to these blessed souls; but she secretly rejoiced
in it, even while she joined Basil in noting
their number and smiling at their innocent abandon.
She dropped his arm at encounter of the first couple,
and walked carelessly at his side; she made a
solemn vow never to take hold of his watch-chain
in speaking to him; she trusted that she might be
preserved from putting her face very close to his
at dinner in studying the bill of fare; getting out
of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by
the waist. All ascetic resolutions are modified by
experiment; but if Isabel did not rigorously keep
these, she is not the less to be praised for having
formed them.

Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Island,
they passed a little group of the Indians still
lingering about Niagara, who make the barbaric
wares in which the shops abound, and, like the
woods and the wild faces of the cliffs and precipices,
help to keep the cataract remote, and to invest it
with the charm of primeval loneliness. This group
were women, and they sat motionless on the ground,
smiling sphinx-like over their laps full of bead-work,
and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation
upon the passers. They wore bright kirtles, and
red shawls fell from their heads over their plump
brown cheeks and down their comfortable persons.
A little girl with them was attired in like gayety
of color. “What is her name?” asked Isabel,

paying for a bead pincushion. “Daisy Smith,”
said her mother, in distressingly good English.
“But her Indian name?” “She has none,” answered
the woman, who told Basil that her village
numbered five hundred people, and that they were
Protestants. While they talked they were joined
by an Indian, whom the women saluted musically
in their native tongue. This was somewhat consoling;
but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and
it could have been wished that he had not a silk
hat on.

“Still,” said Isabel, as they turned away, “I'm
glad he hasn't Lisle-thread gloves, like that chieftain
we saw putting his forest queen on board the
train at Oneida. But how shocking that they
should be Christians, and Protestants! It would
have been bad enough to have them Catholics.
And that woman said that they were increasing.
They ought to be fading away.”

On the bridge, they paused and looked up and
down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their
wild variety, with the white crests of breaking surf,
the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the
fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of
sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the deathful
course beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the
horror of being cast upon it, and then hurried over
the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose
wildness they sought refuge from the sight and
sound.

There had been rain in the night; the air was
full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of
twittering birds. Presently they came to a bench
set in a corner of the path, and commanding a
pleasant vista of sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam
of the foaming river beyond. As they sat down
here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their
courtship, began to recite a poem. It was one
which had been haunting him since his first sight
of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by
heart in his youth — the rhyme of some poor newspaper
poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying
his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clipping
his name from the bottom. It had always
lingered in Basil's memory, rather from the interest
of the awful fact it recorded, than from any
merit of its own; and now he recalled it with a
distinctness that surprised him.

“O Basil!” said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking
the hush that best praised the unknown poet's
skill, “it isn't true, is it?”

“Every word, almost, even to the brother's coming
at the last moment. It 's a very well-known
incident,” he added, and I am sure the reader
whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have
forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly
every point of interest about the place has killed
its man, and there might well be a deeper stain of
crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching
the falls. Its beauty is relieved against an
historical background as gloomy as the lightest-hearted
tourist could desire. The abominable savages,
revering the cataract as a kind of august
devil, and leading a life of demoniacal misery and
wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two

hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily
driving out these squalid devil-worshippers; the
French planting the fort that yet guards the mouth
of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that
fruited afterwards in murderous strifes throughout
the whole Niagara country; the struggle for the
military posts on the river, during the wars of
France and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy
of Pontiac, where a detachment of English
troops was driven by the Indians over the precipice
near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc
visited upon the American settlements in the Revolution
by the savages who prepared their attacks
in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of
Chippewa and of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the
roar of their cannon with that of the fall; the savage
forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and
the blazing villages on either shore in the War of
1812, — these are the memories of the place, the
links in a chain of tragical interest scarcely broken
before our time since the white man first beheld
the mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lost
nothing of their due effect as Basil, in the ramble
across Goat Island, touched them with the reflected
light of Mr. Parkman's histories, — those precious
books that make our meagre past wear something
of the rich romance of old European days, and
illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of
mediæval chivalry, and the glory of mediæval martyrdom,
— and then, lacking this light, turned upon
them the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He
and Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the
zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles
of other times from the shelter of the safe and
peaceful present. They were both poets in their
quality of bridal couple, and so long as their own
nerves were unshaken they could transmute all
facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised
their sympathies upon those who every year
perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful
power; only they refused their cheap and selfish
compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who
dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion,
and was finally carried over the cataract. This
public character they suspected of design in his
death as in his life, and they would not be moved
by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that
dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble,
of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble
all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as
remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island,
there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid
the corner-stone of the new temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited
by so many thousands every year. The shrubbery
and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form
a deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early
hour of the day, they met many other pairs. It
seemed incredible that the village and the hotels
should be so full, and that the wilderness should

also abound in them; yet on every embowered
seat, and going to and from all points of interest
and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with
their interlacing arms and their fond attitudes, in
which each seemed to support and lean upon the
other. Such a pair stood prominent before them
when Basil and Isabel emerged at last from the
cover of the woods at the head of the island, and
glanced up the broad swift stream to the point
where it ran smooth before breaking into the rapids;
and as a soft pastoral feature in the foreground
of that magnificent landscape, they found them far
from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground
of every famous American landscape; and
when I think of the amount of public love-making
in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert
to the Yosemite, and from the parks of Colorado to
the Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent is
but a larger Aready, that the middle of the nineteenth
century is the golden age, and that we want
very little of being a nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian
rapids, having traversed the island by a path
through the heart of the woods, and now drew
slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious
pageant have an eternal novelty, and they
beheld the ever-varying effect of that constant sublimity
with the sense of discoverers, or rather of
people whose great fortune it is to see the marvel

in its beginning, and new from the creating hand.
The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this illusion,
while in the cavernous precipices of the shores,
dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval
night seemed to linger. There was a wild fluttering
of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness
of pain, the exaltation of peril and escape,
when they came to the three little isles that
extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far
out into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges
connect them now with the larger isl
and, and under each of these flounders a huge rapid,
and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the
fall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments of
wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled woods, planted
upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination
of Niagara which no one resists; nor could
Isabel have been persuaded from exploring them.
It wants no courage to do this, but merely submission
to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no
other reward than the consciousness of having been
where but a few years before no human being had
perhaps set foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge
with a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the
outermost isle, whence, through the screen of vines
and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the heaving
and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which
at every instant she rescued herself with a desperate
struggle. The exertion told heavily upon her
strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil
[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 146. In-line Illustration. Image of a woman sitting at the base of a tree while a man stands over her. She looks distressed in some way. Her parasol is on the ground in front of her.] another revelation of character. Without the
slightest warning she sank down at the root of a tree,
and said, with serious composure, that she could
never go back on those bridges; they were not safe.
He stared at her cowering form in blank amaze, and
put his hands in his pockets. Then it occurred to
his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and
he said, “Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat.”

“O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!”
implored Isabel. “You see yourself the bridges
are not safe. Do get a boat.”

“Or a balloon,” he suggested, humoring the
pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his
knees at her side, and took her hands in his. “Isabel!
Isabel! Are you crazy?” he cried, as if he
meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered
in reply; he said, to mend matters, that it
was a jest, about the boat; and he was driven to
despair when Isabel repeated, “I never can go back
by the bridges, never.”

“But what do you propose to do?”

“I don't know, I don't know!”

He would try sarcasm. “Do you intend to set
up a hermitage here, and have your meals sent out
from the hotel? It 's a charming spot, and visited
pretty constantly; but it 's small, even for a hermitage.”

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her
eyes, and wondered that he was not ashamed to
make fun of her.

He would try kindness. “Perhaps, darling,
you'll let me carry you ashore.”

“No, that will bring double the weight on the
bridge at once.”

“Couldn't you shut your eyes, and let me lead
you?”

“Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids,” she said,
looking up fiercely. “The bridges are not safe.
I'm not a child, Basil. O, what shall we do?”

“I don't know,” said Basil, gloomily. “It 's
an exigency for which I wasn't prepared.” Then
he silently gave himself to the Evil One, for having
probably overwrought Isabel's nerves by repeating
that poem about Avery, and by the ensuing
talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to
enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it; and
she answered, “O no, it 's nothing but the bridges.”
He proved to her that the bridges, upon all known
principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could
not give way. She shook her head, but made no
answer, and he lost his patience.

“Isabel,” he cried, “I'm ashamed of you!”

“Don't say anything you'll be sorry for afterwards,
Basil,” she replied, with the forbearance of
those who have reason and justice on their side.

The rapids beat and shouted round their little
prison-isle, each billow leaping as if possessed by a
separate demon. The absurd horror of the situation
overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to
carry her ashore, for she might spring from his
grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to
call for help; and what if nobody came till she lost

her mind from terror? Or, what if somebody
should come and find them in that ridiculous affliction?

Somebody was coming!

“Isabel!” he shouted in her ear, “here come
those people we saw in the parlor last night.”

Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched
Basil's with her icy hand, rose, drew her arm convulsively
through his, and walked ashore without a
word.

In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she
quickly “repaired her drooping head and tricked
her beams” again. He could see her tearfully
smiling through her veil. “My dear,” he said, “I
don't ask an explanation of your fright, for I don't
suppose you could give it. But should you mind
telling me why those people were so sovereign
against it?”

“Why, dearest! Don't you understand? That
Mrs. Richard — whoever she is — is so much like
me.”

She looked at him as if she had made the most
satisfying statement, and he thought he had better
not ask further then, but wait in hope that the
meaning would come to him. They walked on in
silence till they came to the Biddle Stairs, at the
head of which is a notice that persons have been
killed by pieces of rock from the precipice overhanging
the shore below, and warning people that they
descend at their peril. Isabel declined to visit the

Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but
was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower.
“Thanks; no,” said her husband. “You might
find it unsafe to come back the way you went up.
We can't count certainly upon the appearance of
the lady who is so much like you; and I've no
fancy for spending my life on Terrapin Tower.”
So he found her a seat, and went alone to the top
of the audacious little structure standing on the
verge of the cataract, between the smooth curve of
the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Central
Fall, with the stormy sea of the Rapids behind,
and the river, dim seen through the mists, crawling
away between its lofty bluffs before. He knew
again the awful delight with which so long ago he
had watched the changes in the beauty of the Canadian
Fall as it hung a mass of translucent green
from the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl
up from the abyss, and penetrate all its substance
to the very crest, and then suddenly vanished from
it, and perpetually renewed the same effect. The
mystery of the rising vapors veiled the gulf into
which the cataract swooped; the sun shone, and a
rainbow dreamed upon them.

Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks
extend quite to the verge, and here Basil saw an
elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone
to another, and looking down from time to time
into the abyss, who, when he had amused himself
long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 151. In-line Illustration. Image of two men crossing a bridge. In the background is a tower or lighthouse and waterfalls.] bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time,
made bold to say that he thought the diversion an
odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman
took this in good part, and owned it might seem so,
but added that a distinguished phrenologist had
examined his head, and told him he had equilibrium
so large that he could go anywhere.

“On your bridal tour, I presume,” he continued,
as they approached the bench where Basil had left
Isabel. She had now the company of a plain,
middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed
some inward festivity, and had a certain
reluctant fashionableness. “Well, this is my third
bridal tour to Niagara, and wife 's been here once
before on the same business. We see a good many
changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with the
others. Now that 's all gone. Well, old lady,
shall we move on?” he asked; and this bridal pair
passed up the path, attended, haply, by the guardian
spirits of those who gave the place so many
sad yet pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table
next Basil's, and they were all now talking cheerfully
over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall.

“Well, Kitty,” the married lady was saying,
“you can tell the girls what you please about the
gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'll
believe anything sooner than the truth.”

“O yes, indeed,” said Kitty, “I've got a good
deal of it made up already. I'll describe a grand
hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all
parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced
with the most. I'm going to have had quite a flirtation
with the gentleman of the long blond mustache,
whom we met on the bridge this morning,

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 153. In-line Illustration. Image of a man and woman seated at a table while an African-American nurse tends their child in the background.] and he 's got to do duty in accounting for my missing
glove. It'll never do to tell the girls I dropped
it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you
know, Fanny, I really can say something about
dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon
by their black servants.”

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom
Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo
as a Southerner probably coming North for the
first time since the war. He had an air at once
fierce and sad, and a half-barbaric, homicidal gentility
of manner fascinating enough in its way.
He sat with his wife at a table farther down the
room, and their child was served in part by a little
tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact did not quite
answer to the young lady's description of it, and
yet it certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil

fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner,
and explained it upon the theory that he used to
come every year to Niagara before the war, and
was now puzzled to find it so changed.

“Yes,” he said, “I can't account for him except
as the ghost of Southern travel, and I can't help
feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that
almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the
wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of
sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the remains
of the feudal system in the kind of poetry
they produce. The impoverished slave-holder is a
pathetic figure, in spite of all justice and reason;
the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and
it is of no use to think of Andersonville in his presence.
This gentleman, and others like him, used
to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent
the money they did not earn like princes; they
held their heads high; they trampled upon the
Abolitionist in his lair; they received the homage
of the doughface in his home. They came up here
from their rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bullied
the whole busy civilization of the North.
Everybody who had merchandise or principles to
sell truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a
triumphal progress. Now they're moneyless and
subjugated (as they call it), there 's none so poor
to do them reverence, and it 's left for me, an Abolitionist
from the cradle, to sigh over their fate.
After all, they had noble traits, and it was no

great wonder they got to despise us, seeing what
most of us were. It seems to me I should like to
know our friend. I can't help feeling towards him
as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven
spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feels
towards him. I dare say he admires him immensely.”

There were not above a dozen other people in
the room, and Basil contrasted the scene with that
which the same place formerly presented. “In
the old time,” he said, “every table was full, and
we dined to the music of a brass band. I can't
say I liked the band, but I miss it. I wonder if
our Southern friend misses it? They gave us a
very small allowance of brass band when we arrived,
Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder what 's
come over the place,” he said, as the Southern
party, rising from the table, walked out of the dining-room,
attended by many treacherous echoes in
spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the
waiters made.

After dinner they drove on the Canada shore
up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning
Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara.
As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface,
and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff
of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that
the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract
as a demon; and another subtle spell (not to
be broken even by the business-like composure of

the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to
those successive sorceries by which Niagara gradually
changes from a thing of beauty to a thing of
terror. By all odds, too, the most tremendous
view of the Falls is afforded by the point on this
drive whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe,
and behold its three massive walls of sea rounding
and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone,
and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy.

Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy's
Lane? asked the driver at a certain point on their
return; but Isabel did not care for battle-fields,
and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence
of his former visit. “They have a sort of tower
of observation built on the battle-ground,” he said,
as they drove on down by the river, “and it was
in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, who
had helped his countrymen to be beaten in the
fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible
account of the battle, asking me first if I had
ever heard of General Scott, and adding without
flinching that here he got his earliest laurels. He
seemed to go just so long to every listener, and
nothing could stop him short, so I fell into a revery
until he came to an end. It was hard to remember,
that sweet summer morning, when the sun
shone, and the birds sang, and the music of a piano
and a girl's voice rose from a bowery cottage near,
that all the pure air had once been tainted with
battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been

planted with cannon, instead of potatoes and corn,
and that where the cows came down the farmer's
lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men
had befallen. The blue and tranquil Ontario
gleamed far away, and far away rolled the beautiful
land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and
at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village.
The battle of the past seemed only a vagary of
mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior at my
elbow? — grieved though I was to find that a
habit of strong drink had the better of his utterance
that morning. My driver explained afterwards,
that persons visiting the field were commonly
so much pleased with the captain's eloquence,
that they kept the noble old soldier in a brandy-and-water
rapture throughout the season, thereby
greatly refreshing his memory, and making the battle
bloodier and bloodier as the season advanced and
the number of visitors increased. There my dear,”
he suddenly broke off, as they came in sight of a
slender stream of water that escaped from the brow
of a cliff on the American side below the Falls,
and spun itself into a gauze of silvery mist, “that 's
the Bridal Veil; and I suppose you think the
stream, which is making such a fine display, yonder,
is some idle brooklet, ending a long course of
error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge.
It 's nothing of the kind; it 's an honest hydraulic
canal, of the most straightforward character, a poor
but respectable mill-race which has devoted itself
strictly to business, and has turned mill-wheels instead
of fooling round water-lilies. It can afford
that ultimate finery. What you behold in the
Bridal Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry.”

“What I can't help thinking of,” said Isabel,
who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal
Veil, or anything about it, “is the awfulness of
stepping off these places in the night-time.” She
referred to the road which, next the precipice, is unguarded
by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong
wall would secure it, but we manage things differently
on our continent, and carriages go ruining
over the brink from time to time.

“If your thoughts have that direction,” answered
her husband, “we had better go back to the hotel,
and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow morning.
It 's late for it to-day, at any rate.” He had treated
Isabel since the adventure on the Three Sisters with
a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious,
but which he could not disuse.

“I'm not afraid,” she sighed, “but in the words
of the retreating soldier, `I'm awfully demoralized';”
and added, “You know we must reserve
some of the vital forces for shopping this evening.”

Part of their business also was to buy the tickets
for their return to Boston by way of Montreal and
Quebec, and it was part of their pleasure to get
these of the heartiest imaginable ticket-agent. He
was a colonel or at least a major, and he made a

polite feint of calling Basil by some military title.
He commended the trip they were about to make
as the most magnificent and beautiful on the whole
continent, and he commended them for intending to
make it. He said that was Mrs. General Bowder
of Philadelphia who just went out; did they know
her? Somehow, the titles affected Basil as of older
date than the late war, and as belonging to the
militia period; and he imagined for the agent the
romance of a life spent at a watering-place, in
contact with rich money-spending, pleasure-taking
people, who formed his whole jovial world. The
Colonel, who included them in this world, and thereby
brevetted them rich and fashionable, could not
secure a state-room for them on the boat, — a perfectly
splendid Lake steamer, which would take
them down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and on
to Montreal without change, — but he would give
them a letter to the captain, who was a very particular
friend of his, and would be happy to show
them as his friends every attention; and so he wrote
a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in
spite of all reason making him feel for the moment
that he was privileged by a document which was no
doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in
a loud cheerful voice; he laughed jollily at no apparent
joke; he bowed very low and said, “Good
evening!” at parting, and they went away as if he
had blessed them.

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering

through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixture
of quaintness and commonplaceness; in hanging
about the shop-windows with their monotonous variety
of feather fans, — each with a violently red or
yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, — moccasons,
bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches,
bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art
of the neighboring squaws can invent; in sauntering
through these gay booths, pricing many things,
and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full
of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces,
and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher, and
other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological
formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by
the heat of the gas-lights and the persistence of the
mosquitoes. There were very few people besides
themselves in the shops, and Isabel's purchases were
not lavish. Her husband had made up his mind to
get her some little keepsake; and when he had taken
her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops,
and hastily bought her a feather fan, — a magnificent
thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue,
with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre.
When he triumphantly displayed it in their room,
“Who 's that for, Basil?” demanded his wife; “the
cook?” But seeing his ghastly look at this, she
fell upon his neck, crying, “O you poor old tasteless
darling! You've got it for me!” and seemed
about to die of laughter.

“Didn't you start and throw up your hands,”

he stammered, “when you came to that case of
fans?”

“Yes, — in horror! Did you think I liked the
cruel things, with their dead birds and their hideous
colors? O Basil, dearest! You are incorrigible.
Can't you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the
hues that the perverseness of man has invented in
defiance of nature? Now, my love, just promise
me one thing,” she said pathetically. “We're going
to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know;
and perhaps you'll be wanting to surprise me with
something there. Don't do it. Or if you must, do
tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color
of it 's to be; and I can say whether to get it or not,
and then there'll be some taste about it, and I shall
be truly surprised and pleased.”

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he
murmured something about exchanging it. “No,”
she said, “we'll keep it as a — a — monument.”
And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter,
from the proud height to which he had climbed in
pity of her nervous fears of the day. So completely
were their places changed, that he doubted if it
were not he who had made that scene on the Third
Sister; and when Isabel said, “O, why won't men
use their reasoning faculties?” he could not for
himself have claimed any, and he could not urge
the truth: that he had bought the fan more for its
barbaric brightness than for its beauty. She would
not let him get angry, and he could say nothing

against the half-ironical petting with which she
soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and the
next morning they spent a charming hour about
Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat Island,
somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place
on whose wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately
feasted at first. They had already the
feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled
at the greed with which newer-comers plunged
at the sensations. They could not conceive why
people should want to descend the inclined railway
to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at
the idea of going up Terrapin Tower; they derided
the vulgar daring of those who went out upon the
Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw
about to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of
the Winds, they had no words to express their contempt.

Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool,
mistakenly going down on the American side,
for it is much better seen from the other, though
seen from any point it is the most impressive feature
of the whole prodigious spectacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland
seas of the North, Superior, Huron, Michigan,
Erie, and the multitude of smaller lakes, all pour
their floods, where they swirl in dreadful vortices,
with resistless under-currents boiling beneath the
surface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from this

scene of secret power, so different from the thunderous
splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty
cliffs on every side, to a height of two hundred feet,
clothed from the water's edge almost to their crests
with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses
perceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then,
drunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away to
Ontario through the narrow channel of the river.
Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that
you do not know the half of its terribleness; for
those waters that look so smooth are great ridges
and rings, forced, by the impulse of the currents,
twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin.
Nothing can live there, and with what is caught in
its hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls
and tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad,
maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories,
which even their telling does not wholly rob of
ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried
into the whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy
surges a travesty of life, apparently floating there
at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid the
waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the
death that has long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway
suspension bridge, is an elevator more than a
hundred and eighty feet high, which is meant to let
people down to the shore below, and to give a view
of the rapids on their own level. From the cliff
opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure of pine

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 164. In-line Illustration. Image of an elevator built to take people up and down a cliffside. It is surrounded by a scaffolding, and is only attached to an overhang of the cliff at the top.] sticks, but is doubtless
stronger than it looks;
and at any rate, as it has
never yet fallen to pieces,
it may be pronounced perfectly
safe.

In the waiting-room at
the top, Basil and Isabel
found Mr. Richard and his
ladies again, who got into
the movable chamber with
them, and they all silently
descended together. It
was not a time for talk
of any kind, either when
they were slowly and not
quite smoothly dropping
through the lugubrious
upper part of the structure,
where it was darkened
by a rough weather-boarding,
or lower down,
where the unobstructed
light showed the grim
tearful face of the cliff,
bedrabbled with oozy
springs, and the audacious
slightness of the elevator.
An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead
mingled in Isabel's heart with a doubt of the value

of the scene below, and she could not look forward
to escape from her present perils by the conveyance
which had brought her into them, with any satisfaction.
She wanly smiled, and shrank closer to
Basil; while the other matron made nothing of
seizing her husband violently by the arm and imploring
him to stop it whenever they experienced a
rougher jolt than usual.

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out
of their prison by a humid young Englishman, with
much clay on him, whose face was red and bathed
in perspiration, for it was very hot down there in
his little inclosure of baking pine boards, and it
was not much cooler out on the rocks upon which the
party issued, descending and descending by repeated
and desultory flights of steps, till at last they stood
upon a huge fragment of stone right abreast of the
rapids. Yet it was a magnificent sight, and for a
moment none of them were sorry to have come.
The surges did not look like the gigantic ripples on
a river's course as they were, but like a procession
of ocean billows; they arose far aloft in vast bulks
of clear green, and broke heavily into foam at the
crest. Great blocks and shapeless fragments of
rock strewed the margin of the awful torrent;
gloomy walls of dark stone rose naked from these,
bearded here and there with cedar, and everywhere
frowning with shaggy brows of evergreen. The
place is inexpressibly lonely and dreadful, and one
feels like an alien presence there, or as if he had

intruded upon some mood or haunt of Nature in
which she had a right to be forever alone. The
slight, impudent structure of the elevator rises
through the solitude, like a thing that merits ruin,
yet it is better than something more elaborate, for
it looks temporary, and since there must be an elevator,
it is well to have it of the most transitory
aspect. Some such quality of rude impermanence
consoles you for the presence of most improvements
by which you enjoy Niagara; the suspension bridges
for their part being saved from offensiveness by
their beauty and unreality.

Ascending, none of the party spoke; Isabel and
the other matron blanched in each other's faces;
their husbands maintained a stolid resignation.
When they stepped out of their trap into the waiting-room
at the top, “What I like about these
little adventures,” said Mr. Richard to Basil, abruptly,
“is getting safely out of them. Good-morning,
sir.” He bowed slightly to Isabel, who returned
his politeness, and exchanged faint nods, or
glances, with the ladies. They got into their separate
carriages, and at that safe distance made each
other more decided obeisances.

“Well,” observed Basil, “I suppose we're introduced
now. We shall be meeting them from time
to time throughout our journey. You know how
the same faces and the same trunks used to keep
turning up in our travels on the other side. Once
meet people in travelling, and you can't get rid of
them.”

“Yes,” said Isabel, as if continuing his train of
thought, “I'm glad we're going to-day.”

“O dearest!”

“Truly. When we first arrived I felt only the
loveliness of the place. It seemed more familiar,
too, then; but ever since, it 's been growing
stranger and dreadfuller. Somehow it 's begun to
pervade me and possess me in a very uncomfortable
way; I'm tossed upon rapids, and flung from cataract
brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools; I'm no
longer yours, Basil; I'm most unhappily married
to Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my awful
lord!”

She lightly burlesqued the woes of a prima donna,
with clasped hands and uplifted eyes.

“That'll do very well,” Basil commented, “and
it implies a reality that can't be quite definitely
spoken. We come to Niagara in the patronizing
spirit in which we approach everything nowadays,
and for a few hours we have it our own way, and
pay our little tributes of admiration with as much
complacency as we feel in acknowledging the existence
of the Supreme Being. But after a while we
are aware of some potent influence undermining our
self-satisfaction; we begin to conjecture that the
great cataract does not exist by virtue of our approval,
and to feel that it will not cease when we
go away. The second day makes us its abject
slaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in
terror. I believe some people stay for weeks, however,

and hordes of them have written odes to Niagara.”

“I can't understand it, at all,” said Isabel. “I
don't wonder now that the town should be so empty
this season, but that it should ever be full. I wish
we'd gone after our first look at the Falls from
the suspension bridge. How beautiful that was!
I rejoice in everything that I haven't done. I'm
so glad I haven't been in the Cave of the Winds;
I'm so happy that Table Rock fell twenty years
ago! Basil, I couldn't stand another rainbow to-day.
I'm sorry we went out on the Three Weird
Sisters. O, I shall dream about it! and the rush,
and the whirl, and the dampness in one's face, and
the everlasting chir-r-r-r-r of everything!”

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a moment's
oblivion, and then rose radiant with a question:
“Why in the world, if Niagara is really what
it seems to us now, do so many bridal parties come
here?”

“Perhaps they're the only people who've the
strength to bear up against it, and are not easily
dispersed and subjected by it.”

“But we're dispersed and subjected.”

“Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who
knows how it would be if you were nineteen instead
of twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turned
of thirty?”

“Basil, you're very cruel.”

“No, no. But don't you see how it is? We've

known too much of life to desire any gloomy background
for our happiness. We're quite contented
to have things gay and bright about us. Once we
couldn't have made the circle dark enough. Well,
my dear, that 's the effect of age. We're superannuated.”

“I used to think I was before we were married,”
answered Isabel simply; “but now,” she added
triumphantly, “I'm rescued from all that. I shall
never be old again, dearest; never, as long as you
— love me!”

They were about to enter the village, and he
could not make any open acknowledgment of her
tenderness; but her silken mantle (or whatever)
slipped from her shoulder, and he embracingly replaced
it, flattering himself that he had delicately
seized this chance of an unavowed caress and not
knowing (O such is the blindness of our sex!) that
the opportunity had been yet more subtly afforded
him, with the art which women never disuse in this
world, and which I hope they will not forget in the
next.

They had an early dinner, and looked their last
upon the nuptial gayety of the otherwise forlorn
hotel. Three brides sat down with them in travelling-dress;
two occupied the parlor as they passed
out; half a dozen happy pairs arrived (to the
music of the band) in the omnibus that was to
carry our friends back to the station; they caught
sight of several about the shop windows, as they

drove through the streets. Thus the place perpetually
renews itself in the glow of love as long as
the summer lasts. The moon which is elsewhere
so often of wormwood, or of the ordinary green
cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from
the first of June to the last of October; and this is
a great charm in Niagara. I think with tenderness
of all the lives that have opened so fairly
there; the hopes that have reigned in the glad
young hearts; the measureless tide of joy that ebbs
and flows with the arriving and departing trains.
Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and
of fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak:
but here only youth, faith, rapture. I kiss
my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I
were a poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towards
the weak sisterhood of evident brides, and
both our friends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara
at the last moment. I do not know how much of
their content was due to the fact that they had
suffered no sort of wrong there, from those who are
apt to prey upon travellers. In the hotel a placard
warned them to have nothing to do with the miscreant
hackmen on the streets, but always to order
their carriage at the office; on the street the hackmen
whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant
drivers in league with the landlords; yet their
actual experience was great reasonableness and
facile contentment with the sum agreed upon.

This may have been because the hackmen so far
outnumbered the visitors, that the latter could dictate
terms; but they chose to believe it a triumph
of civilization; and I will never be the cynic to
sneer at their faith. Only at the station was the
virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt, by the hotel
porter who professed to find Basil's trunk enfeebled
by travel, and advised a strap for it, which a friend
of his would sell for a dollar and a half. Yet even
he may have been a benevolent nature unjustly
suspected.