tofore been properly placed before the
public.

The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all
pleasant, and none of them fatiguing. When you start out to "do" the
Falls you first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the
privilege of looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of
the Niagara river. A railway "cut" through a hill would be as comely if
it had an angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom. You can
descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the
edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you did
it; but you will then be too late.

The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw
the little steamer, _Maid of the Mist,_ descend the fearful rapids--how
first one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows, and
then the other, and at what point it was that her smoke-stack toppled
overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder--and
how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the
incredible feat of travelling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six
miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was
very extraordinary, anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear
the guide tell the story nine times in succession to different parties,
and never miss a word or alter a sentence or a gesture.

Then you drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery
between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river
below and the chances of having the railway train overhead smashing down
on to you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but,
mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.

On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of
photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an
ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your
solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the
light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime
Niagara; and a great many people _have_ the ineffable effrontery or the
native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.

Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately
pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of
country cousins, all smiling hideously, and all disposed in studied and
uncomfortable attitudes in t