collegiate
institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I dare say any
respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over his city.
But Rochester is for us, who don't know it at all, a city of any time or
country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over piano-fortes, of a
palatial hotel with pastoral waiters and porter,--a city of handsome
streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of the golden age. The only
definite association with it in our minds is the tragically romantic
thought that here Sam Patch met his fate."

"And who in the world was Sam Patch?

"Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud of
distresses me. Have you really, then, never heard of the man who invented
the saying, 'Some things can be done as well as others,' and proved it by
jumping over Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this belief, he attempted
the leap of the Genesee Falls. The leap was easy enough, but the coming
up again was another matter. He failed in that. It was the one thing that
could not be done as well as others."

"Dreadful!" said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. "But what
has all that to do with Rochester?"

"Now, my dear, You don't mean to say you didn't know that the Genesee
Falls were at Rochester? Upon my word, I'm ashamed. Why, we're within ten
minutes' walk of them now."

"Then walk to them at once!" cried Isabel, wholly unabashed, and in fact
unable to see what he had to be ashamed of. "Actually, I believe you
would have allowed me to leave Rochester without telling me the falls
were here, if you hadn't happened to think of Sam Patch."

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief object of their journey
had been to visit the scene of Sam Patch's fatal exploit, and she drew
Basil with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroad station,
beyond which he said were the falls. Presently, after threading their way
among a multitude of locomotives, with and without trains attached, that
backed and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatiently on every side,
they passed through the station to a broad planking above the river on
the other side, and thence, after encounter of more locomotives, they
found, by dint of much asking, a street winding up the hill-side to the
left, and leading to the German Bierhaus that gives access to the best
view of the cataract.

The Americans have characteristically bordered the river with
manufactures, making every d