Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

I went once more to see the Burning Spring, and have no doubt whatever that the City of the Falls, that great pre-eminent humbug, if it had been built, might have easily been lit by natural gas, as it abounds every where in the neighbourhood, the rock under the superior Silurian limestone being a shale containing it, as may be evidenced by those visitors, who are persuaded to go under "the Sheet of Water," as the place is called where the Table Rock projects, and part of the cataract slides over it; for, on reaching the angle next to the spiral stair, a strong smell is plainly perceptible, something between rotten eggs and sulphur; and there you find a little trickling spring oozing out of the precipice tasting of those delectable compounds.

A Yankee, with the soaring imagination of that imaginative race, proposes to set fire to the Horseshoe Fall, and thus get up a grand nocturnal exhibition, to which the Surrey Zoological pyrotechny would bear the same ratio as a sky-rocket to Vesuvius.

There is no great impossibility in this fact, if it was "not a fact" that the rush of the Fall disturbs the superincumbent gases too much to permit it; for there can be but little doubt that there is plenty of materiel at hand, and, some day or other, a lighthouse will be lit with it to guide sleepy loons and other negligent water-fowl over the Falls. I wonder they do not get up a Carburetted Hydrogen Gas Company there, with a suitable engineer and railway, so that visitors might cross over to Goat Island on an atmospheric line. There are plenty of railway stags on both shores, if you will only buy their stock to establish it; and, at all events, it would improve the City of the Falls, which now exhibits the deplorable aspect of three stuccoed cottages turned seedy, and a bare common, in place of a magnificent grove of chestnut trees, which formerly almost rivalled Greenwich Park.

But the crowning glory of "the City" is the Reflecting Pagoda, a thing perched over Table Rock bank; very like a huge pile engine, with a ten-shilling mirror, where the monkey should be. Blessings on Time! though he is a very thoughtless rogue, he has touched this grand effort of human genius in the wooden line slightly, and it will soon follow the horrid water-mill which stood on that most singular and indescribable freak of Nature, the Table Rock. I would have forgiven Lett, the sympathizer, if, instead of assassination and the blowing-up of Brock's Monument, he had confined his attentions to a little serious Guy Fauxing at the Mill and the Reflecting Pagoda.

Niagara—Ne-aw-gaw-rah, thou thundering water! thy glories are departing; the abominable Railway Times has driven along thy borders; and, if I should live to see thee again ten years hence, verily I should not be astounded to find thee locked-up, and a station-house staring me in the visage, from that emerald bower, in thy most mysterious recess, where the vapour is rose-coloured, and the bright rainbow alone now forms the bridge from the Iris Rock!

I was so disgusted to see the spirit of pelf, that concentration of self, hovering over one of the last of the wonders of the world, that I rushed to the Three Horse Railway, and soon forgot all my misery in scrambling for a place; for there was no alternative. There were only three carriages and one open cart on the rail; the three aristocratic conveniences were full; and the coal-box—for it looked very like one—was full also, of loafers and luggage; so I despaired of quitting the Falls almost as much, by way of balance, as I rejoiced when they once again met my ken.

But women are women all the world over; a black lady nursed Mungo Park, when he was abandoned by the world; and a charitable she-Samaritan crowded to make room for a disconsolate wayfarer.

I felt very much as the nigger's parrot at New York did.

Blacky was selling a parrot, and a gentleman asked him what the bird could do. Could he speak well? "No, massa; no peaky at all." "Can he sing?"—"No, massa; no peaky, no singy." "Why, what can he do, then, that you ask twenty dollars for him?" "Oh! massa, golly, he thinky dreadful much." So, when the daughter of Eve made way for me in the rail-car, why I thinky very much, that, wherever a stranger meets unexpected kindness, it is sure to be a woman that offers it.

There were the usual host of American travellers in the cars; and as one generally gets a fund of anecdote and amusement on these occasions, from their habits of communicativeness, I shall put the English reader in possession of the meaning of words he often sees in the perusal of American newspapers and novels which I gathered.