rop work its passage to the brink; while the
Germans have as characteristically made use of the beauty left over, and
have built a Bierhaus where they may regale both soul and sense in the
presence of the cataract. Our travellers might, in another mood and
place, have thought it droll to arrive at that sublime spectacle through
a Bierhaus, but in this enchanted city it seemed to have a peculiar
fitness.

A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival space occupied by many
tables, each of which was surrounded by a group of clamorous Germans of
either sex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lager before them,
and slim flasks of Rhenish; overhead flamed the gas in globes of
varicolored glass; the walls were painted like those of such haunts in
the fatherland; and the wedding-journeyers were fair to linger on their
way, to dwell upon that scene of honest enjoyment, to inhale the mingling
odors of beer and of pipes, and of the pungent cheeses in which the
children of the fatherland delight. Amidst the inspiriting clash of
plates and glasses, the rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse rush
of gutturals, they could catch the words Franzosen, Kaiser, Konig, and
Schlacht, and they knew that festive company to be exulting in the first
German triumphs of the war, which were then the day's news; they saw
fists shaken at noses in fierce exchange of joy, arms tossed abroad in
wild congratulation, and health-pouring goblets of beer lifted in air.
Then they stepped into the moonlight again, and heard only the solemn
organ stops of the cataract. Through garden-ground they were led by the
little maid, their guide, to a small pavilion that stood on the edge of
the precipitous shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls. As they
entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers, passed out,
and they were left alone with that sublime presence. Something of
definiteness was to be desired in the spectacle, but there was ample
compensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgence and the dense
unluminous shadows of the moonshine invested it. The light touched all
the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe sway from the brink of the
cataract, and then desperately breaking and perishing to fall, the white
disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the vast and deep
ravine through which the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed to mass
themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy compactness, now to