or in the last two months I have seen
marvelous much. I have seen Niagara. I wish you had been there to
see it with me. However, Niagara will not cease falling; and you
may, perhaps, at some future time, visit this country. You must not
expect any description of Niagara from me, because it is quite
unspeakable, and, moreover, if it were not, it would still be quite
unimaginable. The circumstances under which I saw it I can tell
you, but of the great cataract itself, what can be told except that
it is water?

I confess the sight of it reminded me, with additional admiration,
of Sir Charles Bagot's daring denial of its existence; having
failed to make his pilgrimage thither during his stay in the United
States, he declared on his return to England that he had never been
able to find it, that he didn't believe there was any such thing,
and that it was nothing but a bragging boast of the Americans.

At Albany, our first resting-place from New York, we had been
joined by Mr. Trelawney, who had been introduced to me in New York,
and turned out to be the well-known friend of Byron and Shelley,
and author of "The Adventures of a Younger Son," which is, indeed,
said to be the story of his own life.

[His wild career of sea-adventure with De Ruyter, who was supposed to
have left him at his death all his share of the results of their
semi-buccaneering exploits, his friendship and fellowship with Byron and
Shelley, the funeral obsequies he bestowed upon the latter on the shore
of the Gulf of Spezzia, his companionship in the mountains of Greece
with the patriot chief Odysseus, and his marriage to that chief's
sister, are all circumstances given with more or less detail in his
book, which was Englished for him by Mary Shelley, the poet's widow, who
was much attached to him; Trelawney himself being quite incapable of any
literary effort which required a knowledge of common spelling.... He was
strikingly handsome when first I knew him, with a countenance habitually
serene, and occasionally sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage
with the fierceness of a wild beast. His speech and movements were slow
and indolently gentle, his voice very low and musical, and his utterance
deliberate and rather hesitating; he was very tall, and powerfully made,
and altogether looked like the hero of a wild life of adventure, such as
his had been. I hea