III.
Wednesday morning was ushered in with a blizzard from the north-west. The roads that had been slushy the day before were hard as adamant. There was ice in the wind. The air was keen as a knife. A traveller who had come in from Manitoba said that during the night it was “as much as your life was worth to pass from one car to another.” Towards noon the weather moderated. The sun came out, the wind changed, the spray from the falls fell into the river. A rainbow stretched its luminous arch over the American falls.
“I have often thought,” I said to Irving, “during this tour, how surprised any English traveller who knew London well would be, if he encountered the Lyceum Company by accident at some wayside American depot, not knowing of this visit to the States.”
“Yes,” he said, “do you remember the people at Amsterdam, in Holland, who followed us in amazement to the hotel there, one of them, a German, making a bet about us, the others ridiculing the idea that I could be out of London, when he had seen me acting there a few days before?”
We were on our way to the falls, driving in a close carriage, Irving, Miss Terry, and myself, and I think we talked on general topics a little, while they were trying to take in the approaches to the great scene of all.
“Toole and his dear boy, Frank, lost their way, one night, about here,” said Irving. “I remember his telling me of it—couldn’t get a carriage—were belated, I remember. There was no fence to the river then, I expect,—a dangerous place to lose your way in. How weird it looks!”
“Oh, there are the falls!” Miss Terry exclaimed, looking through the glass window in front of us. “Surely! Yes, indeed! There they are! How wonderful!”
I had told the driver to pull up at the bend of the river, where we should get the first view of them. Irving turned to look.
“Drive on,” I said, and in a few minutes we pulled up in full view of both falls.
“Very marvellous!” said Irving. “Do you see those gulls sailing through the spray? How regularly the water comes over! It hardly looks like water,—there seems to be no variety in its grand, solid-like roll; and, do you notice, in parts it curls like long, broken ringlets, curls and ripples, but is always the same? What a power it suggests! Of course, the color will vary in the light. It is blue and green in the summer, I suppose; now it is yellowish here and there, and grey. There have been great floods above,—yonder are the rapids above the falls, I suppose? How wonderfully the waters come leaping along,—like an angry sea!”
He stood for some time watching the scene, and noting everything that struck him. Miss Terry joined some members of the company, and went driving. Later a party of us went to the rapids and the whirlpool, where Webb was drowned. Irving discussed the fatal feat, for a long time, with one of the men who saw the swimmer take his courageous header and go bounding through the rapids.
“It was there where he disappeared,” said the man, pointing to a spot where the waters appeared to leap as if clearing an obstruction; “he dived, intending to go through that wave, and never was seen again alive. It is believed his head struck a sunken rock there, which stunned him.”
Irving stood for a long time looking at this part of the river, discussing the various theories as to its depth. “A bold fellow!” he exclaimed, as he left the place; “he deserved to get through it. Imagine the coolness, the daring of it! He takes a quiet dinner, it seems, at his hotel, rests a little, then hires a boat, rows to the place where the rapids fairly begin, strips and dives into this awful torrent,—a great soul, sir, any man who has the nerve for such an enterprise!”
We walked back to the falls, and on our return observed a great change in the color of the scene.
“Quite a transformation in its way, is it not?” said Irving; “let us take in the picture, as a painter might. The horizon, you see, is a bluish-purple; the Canadian falls have a grayish-blue tint, except where the positive golden yellow of the water comes in; then, as it plunges below, the foam is of a creamy whiteness; the mist and spray rise up a warmish-gray in the half-shaded sunlight; the snowy rocks are white against it. The sun is about to set, I suppose, and these are some of its premonitory colors. The river, you see, is now a deep blue,—it was muddy-looking this morning,—and the trees on the banks are a warm greyish-brown. Beyond the American falls, above there, where it is like a lake, the white houses are whiter still, the red ones redder, and the country looks as if it had quite changed its atmosphere. A great stage-manager, Nature! What wonders can be done with effective lighting!”
Then, turning away to go into the house, he said, “Do you remember the lighting of the garden scene in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’—the change from sunset to night, from sunset to moonlight, from moonlight to morning, and the motion of the sunlit trees, as if a zephyr had touched them?”
“I do, indeed!”
“Well, let us talk of something else. Niagara must offer to artist or poet a continual study. Did you notice how the fir-trees on the little island close to the Canadian falls are twisted and warped, as if they had tried to turn away from the tempest, and had been beaten down with the wind and snow? You were telling me one day about a scholarly hermit, who had spent his life at a lonely place on the Hudson. That is also a curious story,—the life and death of Francis Abbott, ‘the hermit of Niagara,’ as they call him in one of the old guide-books. He first appeared here, it seems, on a summer day in 1839,—a young man, tall, well-built, but pale and haggard. He carried a bundle of blankets, a portfolio, a book, and a flute; went to a little out-of-the-way inn and took a room; visited the local library; played his flute, and rambled about the country; got permission to live in a deserted log-house near the head of Goat Island; lived there in a strange seclusion during two winters, then built himself a cabin at Point View, near the American falls, and did not appear to shun his fellow-man so much as formerly. A local judge became quite friendly with him; they would meet and have long talks. Sometimes, too, he would enter into conversation with the villagers, and others whom he encountered on his rambles. He talked well, they say; spoke of Asia and Greece with familiarity, and liked to discuss theological questions. His religious views were akin to quakerism. He was a fine figure, had a sorrowful face, and was attended by a dog, which trotted at his heels always. During the summer he lived in his cabin at Point View; he went down the ferry-steps and bathed in the river, and, on June 10, 1841, he lost his life there,—after two years of this strange solitude. The body had been in the water ten days before it was found at the outlet of the river. The villagers brought it back and buried it. They went to his cabin. His dog guarded the door, a cat lay asleep on his rough sofa, books and music scattered about. There was no writing to be found, though the local judge said he wrote a great deal, chiefly in Latin, and, as a rule, burned his work, whatever it was. In later days friends and relatives of the poor young fellow came to Niagara, and identified him as the son of a Quaker gentleman of Plymouth. Rather a sad story, eh?”
“Yes, very, and there are others, less romantic, but more tragic, in connection with the falls.”
“None more sad, after all, than the death of poor Webb. It is true, he deliberately risked his life. I have seen it stated that the rapids where he dived are by some persons estimated as only twenty or thirty feet deep. Of course nothing can be more absurd. The channel is only three hundred feet wide, and through this gorge rush the waters of five great lakes. Calculating the volume of water, and the velocity of it, the scientists who estimate the depth at two hundred and fifty feet are nearer the mark. The most surprising thing to me about Niagara is the fact—it must be a fact—that this mighty torrent, after falling into the river, ploughs its way along the bottom,—the surface being comparatively calm,—drives along for two miles, and then leaps up from its imprisonment, as it were, into the general view, a wild, fierce torrent, with, further down, that awful whirlpool. Webb knew the force of it all; he had surveyed it,—the cruellest stretch of waters in the world, I suppose,—and yet he took that header, and went along with it hand-over-hand, as the man told us, and with an easy confidence that was heroic,—one would have thought the water would have beaten the life out of him before he had time to rise and fight it!”
“Not long since,” I said, “there was a picnic party on Goat Island. A young fellow, I think the father of the child itself, picked up a little girl, and in fun held it over the rapids above the falls. The child struggled and fell; he leaped in after it, caught it, struggled gallantly in presence of the child’s mother and the distracted friends, but went over the falls. I read the incident in a newspaper chronicle, and have it put away at home with many other notes about the falls, which I hoped to use in this book. Our critics will, of course, recognize the difficulties attending the preparation of these Impressions. We have worked at them in odd places, and at curious times. One wonders how they will come out.”
“Oh, all right, I am sure!” Irving replied: “they are quite unpretentious, and it is delightful to note how they grow up and assume shape and form. I think it was a happy idea.”