ill be a dark mass poised on the
edge of the Fall, and the next there will be one more deafening crash
added even to the thunder of the waters. A few broken splinters will go
sweeping away down the dark river, and all will be over."

But what was it that Tom Leslie saw, more than is revealed to the
natural eyes, looking on that scene when he had contemplated it for a
few moments? This and only this--but quite enough to make the memory of
that moment immortal. He saw it _applied to the human heart and human
life_. The water pouring over the Horse-shoe Fall ceased for the moment
to be the falling water of this real world, and became some weird stream
falling thunderously and in white glory through the land of dreams. The
dark misty gulf into which it poured below was not the physical abyss
over which the natural man must stand with a shudder, but the unfathomed
pit of woe and sorrow into which, in nightmare dreams, man has been ever
falling yet never destroyed, since the first visions of early childhood.
The tower ceased to be a palpable mass of wood and stone, and became
human hope and energy, with the clear blue sky of God's providence
above, beaten by storms and undermined by fierce currents every moment
threatening it with destruction, but standing yet through all. And the
old wrecked schooner above had ceased to be a mere material wreck of
plank and timber and iron--it was one of those unreal but sadder wrecks
of a human life and a human soul, stranded for the moment on the rock of
some great calamity, and eventually to be swept away and engulfed by the
inevitable.

There had been a slight veil of haze shrouding the sun for the previous
half hour; but as Tom Leslie partially awakened from his dream and
listlessly descended the stairs cut in the bank, towards the bridge
leading to the Tower, the mist rolled away, the sun broke forth in the
glory of high-noon, and out of the darkness below sprang an arch of
light that almost made the journalist, who was too old and too
world-hardened for such exhibitions, clap his hands and cry: "The
rainbow! the rainbow!" Of old he had seen the rainbow spanning the
eastern heaven when looking out at early evening from the home of his
childhood, and when the thunder-storms of summer were dying away over
the Atlantic; but here it was, a thing of arms' reach, and at his feet!
At one moment it merely glimmered up through the mist from the bed of
the river, a little broken space of the ar