of the boat that is lying so
near, Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and
hurled Headlong on to the cataract's brink, and out of the world.

"O Basil!" said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking the hush that best
praised the unknown poet's skill, "it isn't true, is it?"

"Every word, almost, even to the brother's coming at the last moment.
It's a very well-known incident," he added, and I am sure the reader
whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly every point of interest
about the place has killed its man, and there might well be a deeper
stain of crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching the
falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy
as the lightest-hearted tourist could desire. The abominable savages,
revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of
demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two
hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these
squalid devil-worshippers; the French planting the fort that yet guards
the mouth of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited
afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole Niagara country;
the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of
France and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac,
where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the
precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon
the American settlements in the Revolution by the savages who prepared
their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and
of Lundy's Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of
the fall; the savage forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and the
blazing villages on either shore in the War of 1812,--these are the
memories of the place, the links in a chain of tragical interest
scarcely broken before our time since the white man first beheld the
mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect
as Basil, in the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the
reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories,--those precious books that
make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European
days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval
chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom,--and then, lacking this
ligh