dy wanted to know was whether the water would hold out long enough to
bring her back again.

"Niagara dry up in five minutes? Wal, old gal, that's clever! Guess this
railway's bin workin' every day you have--forty-five years now."

The questioner, who had witnessed, at the least computation, sixty
summers come and go, promptly vanished at this soft impeachment, and I
descended alone.

[Illustration: INCLINED RAILWAY, NIAGARA.]

Wonderful, magnificent as Niagara indubitably is, that sense which
enables me to drink in and appreciate to the full Nature's works of
sublime grandeur and vastness was ruined for the day. My eyes had beheld
the "Three Sisters" in the rocks; after that they discovered faces in
everything. They fell upon this mountain of ice and beheld spray that
had frozen into a grinning mask. Cautiously I picked my way along the
treacherous surface in the direction of its ear to see the spray rising
up from the other side, when suddenly my feet slipped on the ice and I
had had a fall as well as seen one.

In all probability this _contretemps_ would have been avoided had I not
been followed by one of those pests, a guide, the sight of whom caused
me to make undue hurry over the frozen surface. Harpies of this ilk are
the bane of sight-seeing all the world over.

My next performance was to drive through the town of wood for the
purpose of striking the water at another point; this accomplishment
being attended with the risk of being run over by passing trains, which
run vindictively as well as promiscuously over the unprotected
thoroughfares.

Having run this gauntlet successfully, I passed through a house which is
a store containing photographs and mementoes of the place and a couple
of persevering, persuasive maidens, whose efforts to make life a burden
to you until you buy some of the rubbish are usually rewarded with
unqualified success. After fighting my way through this edifice I was
taken in hand by a juvenile guide, who discoursed in the orthodox
fashion of his kind about the Whirlpool Rapid, pointed out where plucky,
foolish Captain Webb met his death, crushed by the force of water, and,
lower down, the spot where his body was found. Then my young chaperon
unburdened himself of a string of horrors concerning men in barrels,
insane women who from time to time have thrown themselves in, the little
steamer whose occupants shot the rapids for a wager and nearly paid for
their temerity with their lives