t there had been no change
which the human eye could perceive, in the great cataract or its
surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his
departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern
boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is
changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges
on the eternal. He saw that the great American Rapid still came
thundering down, "like a herd of white buffaloes with wild eyes and
sea-green manes," as a graphic writer has described it; that the grand
old trees with their gloomy immensity of shade and the thousands of
unknown and long-forgotten names carved upon their bark, still stood as
sentinels along the beaten pathways over the Island; that the thunder of
the Fall still kept the whole solid mass of the Island in one creeping
and trembling shudder, as if a slight earthquake was just passing, with
a dull, heavy boom like that of a continuous distant cannonade, coming
up in the pauses of the wind.

He saw, too, as he paid his inevitable quarter at the toll-house on the
causeway, that the course of "honest industry" (_i.e._, that blatant
humbug which eternally taxes the pockets for superfluities) had not been
checked; for the usual amount of birchen-canoes, bead-caps and
feather-fans with sprawled birds in the centre, were on sale under
peculiarly aboriginal auspices. And that the whole race of Jehus had not
relieved society by going to be killed-off in the war, he became
painfully aware by the number of villainous-looking wretches armed with
dilapidated whips, who beset him on the bridge and offered to convey him
anywhere for something less than the mere pleasure of his company. Tom
Leslie had been somewhat too familiar in other lands as well as his own,
with such human vermin as those with the whips, and such fungi
temptations to extravagance as those that hung from the tawny hands and
beckoned from shelves and glass cases,--to pay them much attention or
receive much annoyance from them; and so he passed on across the Island,
to look once more upon the great English Fall and the Canada shore
beyond.

Emerging from the woods upon the high bank overlooking the English
rapids, the whole unequalled scene burst once more on his view, as he
had patriotically tried to remember it when looking at Terni and
Schaffhausen. He had carried the sight and almost the roar with him, in
memory, ready to dwarf with t