erous; the falls on the American side showed
fitfully like patches of light and foam; the Horseshoe, mostly hidden
by a cold silver mist, occasionally loomed up a white and ghostly mass.
They stood for a long time looking down at the foot of the American
Fall, the moon now showing clearly the plunge of the heavy column--a
column as stiff as if it were melted silver-hushed and frightened by the
weird and appalling scene. They did not know at that moment that there
where their eyes were riveted, there at the base of the fall, a man's
body was churning about, plunged down and cast up, and beaten and
whirled, imprisoned in the refluent eddy. But a body was there. In the
morning a man's overcoat was found on the parapet at the angle of the
fall. Someone then remembered that in the evening, just before the park
gate closed, he had seen a man approach the angle of the wall where the
overcoat was found. The man was never seen after that. Night first, and
then the hungry water, swallowed him. One pictures the fearful leap into
the dark, the midway repentance, perhaps, the despair of the plunge. A
body cast in here is likely to tarry for days, eddying round and round,
and tossed in that terrible maelstrom, before a chance current ejects
it, and sends it down the fierce rapids below. King went back to the
hotel in a terror of the place, which did not leave him so long as he
remained. His room quivered, the roar filled all the air. Is not life
real and terrible enough, he asked himself, but that brides must cast
this experience also into their honeymoon?

The morning light did not efface the impressions of the night, the
dominating presence of a gigantic, pitiless force, a blind passion of
nature, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Shut the windows and lock the
door, you could not shut out the terror of it. The town did not seem
safe; the bridges, the buildings on the edge of the precipices with
their shaking casements, the islands, might at any moment be engulfed
and disappear. It was a thing to flee from.

I suspect King was in a very sensitive mood; the world seemed for the
moment devoid of human sympathy, and the savageness and turmoil played
upon his bare nerves. The artist himself shrank from contact with this
overpowering display, and said that he could not endure more than a day
or two of it. It needed all the sunshine in the face of Miss Lamont and
the serenity of her cheerful nature to make the situation tolerable,
and eve