g more translucently green, nor more perennially still and
lovely, than Niagara the greater. At this, her awful brink, the whole
architrave of the main abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought
in polished aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely colored cornice of the
enormous waterfall--this brim of bright tranquillity between fervor of
rush and fury of plunge--is its principal feature, and stamps it as far
more beautiful than terrible. Even the central solemnity and
shudder-fraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is rendered
exquisite, reposeful, and soothing by the lovely rainbows hanging over the
turmoil and clamor.

From its crest of chrysoprase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of
milky foam and of its white-stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to
begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely
and deliciously graceful, glad and lovely--a specimen of the splendor of
water at its finest--a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with
ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect
it in seeing or to haunt it in future days of memory with any wild
reminiscences of terror or of gloom.

THE DISCOVERY OF NIAGARA.

BY JOHN GALT.

Among the earliest missionaries sent to convert the Indians to the
Christian belief was Joseph Price, a young man who had received directions
to penetrate farther into the vast forests which clothe the continent of
America toward the north than had been at that time accomplished. In this
hazardous undertaking he was accompanied by Henry Wilmington, who,
actuated by the same religious motives, had volunteered to attend him.

They had been landed at Boston, then a very small but thriving village,
about a month previous, where they made the necessary preparations for
their expedition, and recruited themselves after a passage of thirteen
weeks from Plymouth, for so long a passage was not uncommon in those times
in traversing the Atlantic.

It was a fine morning in the latter end of May when they bade adieu to the
inhabitants, by whom they had been hospitably entertained, and,
accompanied by the good wishes of all, proceeded toward the hitherto
unexplored forest.

The buds were now beginning to expand into leaves, and the sun was often
darkened by the vast flocks of migratory pigeons, which, when the woods
allowed, sometimes flew so close to the ground that the travelers could
beat them down with their sticks. Befor