ON the following Wednesday morning I took the accommodation train for Niagara Falls. When I say “accommodation train,” do not fancy that we went jogging along at the rate of six or eight miles an hour. That is not the style of the New York Central. The accommodation trains make twenty miles an hour, including numerous stoppages, which is better time than is made by the express trains of some roads I have traveled on.

So, I arrived at Niagara, eighty miles from Rochester, by nine o’clock; where I left my trunk at an hotel and walked out to see the sights.

It would be presumptuous in any man to attempt a regular description of Niagara Falls, with the expectation of doing the subject justice—much more so in the unpretending John Smith. No one can form a fair idea of the mighty cataract without having seen it. Nor will one mere glance be sufficient. You may spend whole days there before you arrive at a just appreciation of it. The mind cannot grasp it at once.

A friend had told me that I should, on first visiting Niagara, experience a sense of disappointment—that the Falls would not appear quite equal to their reputation and my consequent anticipations; but that, by and by, as I should come to contemplate them more maturely, I should be led to regard them as infinitely grander and more majestic, than my loftiest anticipations had painted them. I found it true. As the train approached, I heard the roar of the cataract, and saw the green waters tumbling down with their white robes of spray; but I somehow thought they did not come up to my expectations, or rather experienced a vague, indescribable impression that I had seen the like before. But when I walked down to the bank, stood in the midst of the mighty thunder, felt the earth tremble beneath the giant leap of the great river, saw the dashing spray, arising like clouds of smoke and dust from the sudden ruin of some great city; when I remembered that for ages and ages, from time lost in dim obscurity, day and night, winter and summer, never ceasing, never tiring, the mighty waters had been tumbling and plunging down from the dizzy height, as now; and when I thought of the future, when I mused of the unknown ages to come, fancied generation after generation to have passed away; when I imagined this great round sphere to have made thousands of annual revolutions around the sun, and pictured the grand old cataract, with none of its vigor lost in the maze of centuries, still thundering away, with the same old strength, young, mighty, glorious, majestic as ever: then did I begin to realize the magnitude of the lofty cataract, the work of the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, and feel the littleness, the nothingness, of man!

The following lines written in the immediate presence of the great cataract, by David Paul Brown, Jr., Esquire, of the Philadelphia Bar, are highly worthy of perusal:

I am sure you will not quarrel with me, reader, for introducing these graphic and eloquent lines, and for growing sentimental over my remembrance of Niagara Falls. They are too grand to be passed over lightly. Thus far, since my arrival at Niagara, you have not found much of the John Smithian tone in my narrative.

I had heard a good deal about the “Cave of the Winds,” and thought I would like to visit it. So, after standing for a full hour, wrapped up in the glories of the thundering cataract, I inquired of a respectable-looking gentleman where the “Cave of the Winds” was?

“You must go over on Goat Island to see that,” he said; “but I hope you don’t think of going down?”

“O, yes,” I replied.

“What——on one leg?”

“Yes, I shall certainly take it with me.”

“But it is dangerous. You will have to go down a steep flight of wooden steps, and pass behind the sheet of water where you cannot stand up. The spray will blind you, and the wind will take your breath and lift you off your feet——”

“Foot,” I interrupted.

“Yes, will lift you off your foot; and one mis-step is certain death. Many strong men with two legs are afraid to try it.”

“They have two feet, and are therefore just twice as apt to slip or make a mis-step.”

“Well,” said he, “go and see it, and I don’t believe you will venture down. A look down into it will satisfy you. It will remind you of all the accounts you have heard of Hades——”

“Where I thought water was not so plenty,” I interrupted.

“You are ahead of me again,” said he, laughing. “Well, follow the bank of the river till you reach a bridge: that will take you over to Goat Island.”

“Thank you.”

I walked up the shore of the river a little way and came to the bridge—a suspension bridge of four or five spans—and went over to Goat Island. This island divides the turbulent river, just before it takes its fearful plunge, into two cataracts. That on this side is termed the “American Fall;” that between Goat Island and Canada being termed the “Horse-shoe Fall,” because of its shape. The American Fall is nine hundred feet wide and one hundred and sixty-four feet high; while the Horse-shoe Fall is two thousand feet wide and one hundred and fifty-eight feet high. By far the larger portion of the water tumbles over on the Canada side of the island, no doubt because the rocky bed of the river is six feet lower on that side; the cataract on either side, however, is stupendous enough for all practical purposes.

In this connection I am reminded of an anecdote, with which I will conclude this chapter. Two Yankees, one of a sentimental and the other of a practical turn of mind, were standing side by side, gazing on this prodigy of Nature.

“How sublime!” exclaimed the former. “To think that it falls one hundred and sixty-four feet at a single leap!”

“What’s to hinder it?” responded the other.