The rain was still heavy and incessant when the party arrived at Niagara, but they were all bent on making the best of it, and some of them walked from the station at the Falls. They trudged manfully through mud and water along the road right up to the verge of the whirling clouds of steam-like vapour which were drifting over the Canadian side, by the edge of the gruesome gorge through which the St. Lawrence[8] runs at full speed, as if terrified by its tremendous jump, to escape into placid Ontario, and, to the immense wonder of a solitary spectator, went past the hotel. "Well," quoth he, when it went forth that "the Duke, Lord Stafford, and others were walking," "that's ree-markable! The Duke walking in the rain! I guess he don't mind being wet"—which was a fact.
Well! Niagara has disappointed no one, for a wonder! I have seen people who were quite displeased with the Falls at first, because they failed to grasp the magnitude of what they came to look at. And it must be owned the circumstances under which we beheld it were not exhilarating. Church has painted the scene; gifted beings may pour out their souls in a great cascade of words to express what they think ought to be felt by "a properly prehensile intelligence" at the sight, but no one can describe it.
I should have thought it was scarcely within the reach of the power of man to render this stupendous spectacle so irritating to the eye. But on the American side they have succeeded in making Niagara nearly hideous with smoke-stacks, factory chimneys, staring advertisements, and the affiches of quack doctors painted on the rocks. Down by the edge of the water they have put a thing with blue, red, and white bands, like an enormous humming-top, and the banks of the river are disfigured by shoots of rubbish of all sorts, débris and timber, and, terrible to relate, streams of black oozy tarry matter discharged from the gasworks!
On Friday, 13th May, the landlord of the Clifton House was notified of the coming of the party. His house was closed, awaiting the opening day, but Mr. Cotham, scorning the word "impossible," and trenching on the reservations of the Sabbath, set to work, telegraphed to New York for waiters, cooks, and domestics, and papered, painted, and fixed up and dusted so energetically, that when the starving travellers were delivered at his house, they found the interior as dry, warm, and comfortable as if they had been lodged—I had nearly in my Chauvinism written in any English—but will stay in any good hotel at the height of the season. There was a splendid—that is the word—stove in the hall. It was called "The Crowning Glory," and it looked so bright and cheerful, and threw out such a pleasant glow, that it gained instant favour, and its fellows are now warming up English and Scotch interiors. Even the "Museum," inevitable adjunct of such scenes as Niagara, was open, and the good lady was quite ready to sell any number of photographs, fossils, feathers, Indian nick-nacks, warm purse belts, mocassins, and the like, but generally the establishments on the British side looked dank and mouldy. We went to bed, to the thunder of the waters and to the clatter of all the window-shutters, in the hope of a fine day to-morrow—and awoke to find it was not realised.
May 17th.—"Twenty golden years ago"—not that they, or any of them, brought gold to me—since I stood on the esplanade at Clifton House with Augustus Anson, who was fresh from the sunny South and Washington, and another Britisher on his travels! There were few visitors then, for it was winter time. The river, struggling with the bonds of frost, cleft its way between snow-covered banks, bearing triumphantly through the narrowed channel floes of ice which were churned into creamy waves and foam in the wild leap into the gulf, which now was hidden by dense clouds of vapour and drifting rain and fog—cold, raw—and I thought it was incomparably the grandest and the "purest" sight that human eye could see. Above a bright blue sky. Below all the landscape was clad in white—trees, and fields, and house-tops—no other colour anywhere visible save the green of the rushing river, almost of emerald hue, and the stark peaks of the reefs of rocks. Somehow the spectacle was not so striking now. There was only one colour, lead, everywhere, except the Humming-top and the blackened ruins of a factory over on the American side. Stay! What is that rising out of the broken water? I fixed my glass on it, and by all that is horrible I made out a monster advertisement of a quack medicine painted in gigantic letters many feet in height on a huge frame of wood above the Falls. The monster seized the moment when an ice bridge had formed from the shore to one of the rocky islands, and had sent his emissaries across to erect the hideous thing, and when the ice was swept away it was out of the power of anything but artillery to reach it. How delighted I should have been to have opened fire on the outrage!
Lord Dufferin made an effort to secure the Canadian side as public property when he was Governor-General, and the American Government had or has a Commission to the same end on their side, so that in the fulness of time the profanation of one of the most magnificent and awful of Nature's works may be averted, but I own that there are grave reasons to dread the worst. The factory is to be rebuilt at once in red brick! The gasworks are to be enlarged. The harpies are sharpening their beaks and claws. They will fight to the death for their "rights." It is a case for an æsthetic despotism to deal with; but where is that blessing to be looked for now?
Every one went out and had a nibble of a look at the Falls early in the morning. After breakfast the Duke and the other visitors, clad in waterproofs, which soon glistened like coats of black mail, set out on their excursion, and we saw them in half an hour afterwards, when they had crossed the Suspension Bridge to the American side, descending to the edge of the basin by the snow boulders which had not yet yielded to the sunshine. I believe that every one of the party enjoyed his sight-seeing most thoroughly, each in his own way. There was, perhaps, a general impression among the serious-minded and practical that Niagara was having too much of its own way, and that it ought to be turned to better account as a reserve of force. The ultimate destiny of that great power may be safely predicted. Niagara will turn machinery.
After mid-day Lord Stafford, Mr. Wright, and myself drove from the hotel to do the sights. It is an aggravating function. There never was such a nest of harpies as is nurtured here. Talk of a Swiss valley, or Savoy, or the Lakes, or Killarney, of any place infested by the creatures who live on travellers' blood—roll them into one gigantic fee-devouring giant, with the hands and heads of Briareus, it would not be "a circumstance" to Niagara. Every step is marked by demands for dollars and cents. There must be some authority for these payments, but somehow it strikes one that Niagara, which is doing its part—the chief certainly in the play—derives no benefit from its performance, and that a set of impostors are turning its waters into silver and gold. I have no patience with such imposts. I swear, and eke I pay. American side, Canadian side, Goat Island, Burning Well—they are all the same, "Dollars and cents." How near death one may be when he is in a passion! I was walking over a bridge made of planks, from one island to another, on our way from the Burning Well—my foot slipped, and I shot off the plank on my back—No! not into the water, but on a bed of sedge.—There was no one near me. I had just crossed a similar bridge, where a similar accident would have sent me into a rush of water, wherein a few gasps and cries would have been all that could have preceded the death of the strongest swimmer in his agony. But that is a detail. There were at dinner some very clever gentlemen, whose conversation and ideas proved that go-ahead-ishness is not exclusively an American attribute. One of them destroyed Manitoulin, my Island of the Blest with a few contemptuous criticisms. It was, he declared, "a very one-horse sort of place," but he knew of an immense tract to be had almost for a song, where there were homes for thousands, all bound to prosper, &c. And then we heard a development of interesting theories of what might be done with Niagara as a motive force in the way of working spindles, machinery, electric lighting, irrigating, something like M. Victor Hugo's notion, in 'L'Homme qui Rit,' of setting the tides to work on the coast of France. All the while there was Niagara thundering away, never minding the theories, and bent on the practical business of escaping into the sea.
After an animated attack on Montcalm by some of the party, who had been reading up a guide-book in their rain-bound leisure, for allowing his English prisoners to be massacred (vide Fenimore Cooper), we broke up for the night. Next morning (April 18th) our party had to lament another departure. Mr. Knowles sailed last Saturday from Quebec, and now Lord Stafford retraces his steps to the Citadel, and thence goes homeward by way of New York, and we lose one of the best companions in the world. He bade us good-bye, and went off by the 10.30 A.M. train eastward, and half an hour later we drove over the Suspension Bridge to the station on the American side.