“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.”