“I have been looking all round for you,” said a lady, whom they had found the day before to be a most agreeable fellow-traveler, as she alighted from the carriage, “and they told me at the hotel that you had gone to Goat Island, so I came here with the expectation of finding you.”
After looking awhile at the fall, they descended the hill, crossed the Terrapin bridge, and ascending the winding staircase in the stone tower, they came out on the circular balcony above. It was fearful to look from that giddy height down into the foaming depths below, and in the midst of those maddening waters one could scarcely believe that the town had a foundation sufficiently firm to resist their onward course. The columns of spray, driven by the east wind, almost obscured the opposite cliffs.
Mrs. Bushnell wished Mrs. Lester and Norman to accompany her in her drive round Goat Island home; but they preferred another hour spent in sight of the fall. Many carriages drove up while they sat there, and men with cigars in their mouths jumped out, ran down the hill, over the bridge, and up the stairs to the tower, where they took a hurried look at the mighty torrent, and speedily regained their carriages and were off.
“I really think, mother,” said Norman, “that we are enjoying Niagara more than any one. We are having such a long look.”
In the afternoon they accompanied Mrs. Bushnell and her nephew to the British side of the river. They crossed the Suspension Bridge, about two miles below the falls. It is a miracle of art, a beautiful work of man, in harmonious contrast with the stupendous works of God. Norman, who had been studying his guide book, told them that there were more than eighteen million feet of wire, and that the aggregate length of wire was more than four thousand miles.
They rode over the lower carriage way of the bridge, which is a single span, eight hundred feet in length between the massive towers by which it is supported. In crossing they had a fine distant view of the two falls, and of the fearful chasm beneath, with its solemn deep waters, quiet as if exhausted by their recent plunge.
The afternoon was decidedly stormy, the rain fell fast, dimming the glass of the carriage, and driving in upon them, when the window was open. The spray hung before the falls as a dense cloud, obscuring more than half of them from view.
On their return Mr. White, Mrs. Bushnell’s nephew, took Norman by the hand, and walked over the railroad bridge, while the carriage passed beneath. Norman looked with wonder at those mighty cables, twisted with so many wires, and supporting with their interlacing ropes that great structure weighing eight hundred tons. It seemed so solid and substantial, that Norman did not think of any danger in crossing it, air hung as it is over the great abyss.
Another cloudy day, but it was a happy day to Norman and his mother. As they loitered at Point View and on Goat Island, Norman took three or four pencil sketches, to be copied and filled up at his leisure. He gathered some pretty white and blue flowers on Goat Island, and arranged them fancifully in an Indian birch-bark canoe which he had just purchased.
“Mother,” said he, holding it up to her, “this canoe looks just like one of which I have seen a picture. It illustrates an Indian legend of the paradise of flowers. They are represented as still retaining their flowerlike forms, leisurely reclining in canoes, floating gently in the placid streams of the spirit land.”