e upon those mysterious falls, vital with
traditions terribly beautiful, and again and again ask, "Can they be
true? Can it be that beneath these waters, behind that sheet of foam
is a room, spacious and vast, and well known, and frequented by the
Indian?"

An old man will tell you that one morning as he stood watching the
rainbows of the fall, he was surprised at the sudden appearance of an
Indian from the very midst of the foam. He accosted him, asked whence
he came, and how he escaped the terrible plunge of the descending
waves. The Indian, old and white-headed, with the eye of an eagle, and
the frame of a Hercules, raised the old man from the ground, shook him
fiercely, and then cast him like a reptile to one side. A moment more
and the measured stroke of a paddle betrayed the passage of the stout
Red Man adown the stream.

Our story must establish the fact in regard to this cave--a fact well
known in the earlier records of the country, more than one white man
having found himself sufficiently athletic to plunge behind the sheet
of water and gain the room.

It was mid-day, and the sun, penetrating the sheet of the falls, cast
a not uncheerful light into the cave, the size and gloom of which were
still further relieved by a fire burning in the centre, and one or
more torches stuck in the fissures of the rocks. Before this fire
stood a woman of forty or fifty years of age, gazing intently upon the
white, liquid, and tumultuous covering to the door of her home, and
yet the expression of her eye showed that her thoughts were far beyond
the place in which she stood.

She was taller than the wont of Indian women, more slender than is
customary with them at her period of life, and altogether, presented a
keenness and springiness of fibre that reminded one of Arab more than
aboriginal blood. Her brow was high, retreating, and narrow, with
arched and contracted brows, beneath which fairly burned a pair of
intense, restless eyes.

At one side, stretched upon skins, appeared what might have been
mistaken for a white veil, except that a draft of air caused a portion
of it to rise and fall, showing it to be a mass of human hair. Yet so
motionless was the figure, so still a tiny moccasoned foot, just
perceptible, and so ghastly the hue and abundance of the covering,
that all suggested an image of death.

At length the tall woman turned sharply round and addressed the object
upon the mats.

"How much longer will you slee