gara, and her husband mistook her
pantomime for gestures of wonder and admiration. Some moments
passed, and then the curtain swung in, and tons of water drenched the
Englishman, and for an instant hid him from sight. Then, as the curtain
swung back, he was seen clinging to the handrail, sputtering and
astonished at such treatment. He came up the bank dripping, and
declaring that it was extraordinary, most extraordinary, but he wouldn't
have missed it for the world. From this platform one looks down the
narrow, slippery stairs that are lost in the boiling mist, and wonders
at the daring that built these steps down into that hell, and carried
the frail walk of planks over the bowlders outside the fall. A party in
oil-skins, making their way there, looked like lost men and women in
a Dante Inferno. The turbulent waters dashed all about them; the mist
occasionally wrapped them from sight; they clung to the rails, they
tried to speak to each other; their gestures seemed motions of despair.
Could that be Eurydice whom the rough guide was tenderly dragging out of
the hell of waters, up the stony path, that singular figure in oil-skin
trousers, who disclosed a pretty face inside her hood as she emerged?
One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue such a woman; but
why take her there? The group of adventurers stopped a moment on the
platform, with the opening into the misty cavern for a background, and
the artist said that the picture was, beyond all power of the pencil,
strange and fantastic. There is nothing, after all, that the human race
will not dare for a new sensation.

The walk around Goat Island is probably unsurpassed in the world for
wonder and beauty. The Americans have every reason to be satisfied with
their share of the fall; they get nowhere one single grand view like
that from the Canada side, but infinitely the deepest impression of
majesty and power is obtained on Goat Island. There the spectator is in
the midst of the war of nature. From the point over the Horseshoe Fall
our friends, speaking not much, but more and more deeply moved, strolled
along in the lovely forest, in a rural solemnity, in a local calm,
almost a seclusion, except for the ever-present shuddering roar in
the air. On the shore above the Horseshoe they first comprehended the
breadth, the great sweep, of the rapids. The white crests of the waves
in the west were coming out from under a black, lowering sky; all the
foreground was in b