“Really, Hugh,” exclaimed his sister, “I should scarcely have expected to hear you rhapsodizing at such a rate! We shall have to look after him, Kate.” Hugh replied only by a half smile, but May noticed his heightened color and the absorbed expression of his dark blue eyes, and began to feel much less shy of him. She had much the same feeling herself, though too reserved to say it out.
Kate hurried them on, until they had reached the very edge of the great Horse-shoe Fall. Here they stopped and sat down on a long black beam of timber that lay on the side of the quivering torrent, there seeming almost stationary, as if pausing in awe of the mighty leap before it. Just inside the old beam lay a quiet pool, reflecting the sky, in which a child might bathe its feet without the slightest danger, while, on the outside, swept the great resistless flood of white-breasted rapids, moving down the steep incline with a majesty only less inspiring than that of the cataract itself.
“Well! don’t you think Niagara deserves its name, which means ‘Thunder of Waters’?” asked Kate, after a long silence.
“It scarcely could have one that better describes the impression it makes,” said Hugh Macnab, in a low, meditative tone.
“Are you tired yet, Hugh?” asked Kate; “shall we walk on—it’s a good mile—or take a carriage?”
“Walk, by all means,” said Hugh, “if the rest of you are not tired.”
They walked leisurely on by the shore, washed by the swift hurrying water, while, above them, to their right, Kate pointed out the railway track along which they had come, and the point at which they had stopped, in order to get the celebrated “Fall view.”
“I shall never forget it,” said Flora. “I was a little disappointed at first about the height. I couldn’t see that from there, nor realize it at all! But the grandeur of the scale quite took my breath away. It was like seeing Mont Blanc for the first time. It takes a little while before you can feel yourself grow up to it!”
“That’s it exactly!” exclaimed Kate. “That just expresses my own feelings when I saw them first. Well, May, you look sober enough over it all.”
“Oh, Kate, it’s too grand for words; I’m trying to ‘grow up to it,’” she added, smiling.