“For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the delicious verdure on the American shore, the glorious trees, the massed foliage, the luxuriant growth even to the very rim of the ravine! By Jove! it seems to me things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand upon?”
“How exquisitely” said Job, soliloquizing “that small green island divides the fall! What a rock it must be founded on, not to have been washed away in the ages that these waters have split against it!”
“I'll lay you a bet it is washed away before the year two thousand—payable in any currency with which we may then be conversant.”
“Don't trifle!”
“With time or geology do you mean? Is'nt it perfectly clear, from the looks of that ravine, that Niagara has backed up all the way from Lake Ontario? These rocks are not adamant, and the very precipice you stand on has cracked, and looks ready for the plunge. It must gradually wear back to Lake Erie, and then there will be a sweep I should like to live long enough to see. The instantaneous junction of two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in their levels will be a spectacle—eh, Job?”
“Tremendous!”
“Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you come to breakfast?”
He was immovable. I left him on the rock, went up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee, and when they were on the table, gave two of the waiters a dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens. He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite, and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet Miss ——, as she stepped like Aurora from her chamber.
The adventure beneath the sheet is now detailed. The party descend to the bottom of the precipice at the side of the Fall—equip themselves in dresses of coarse linen—and proceed. The guide going first, takes the right hand of Miss ——, Mr. Slingsby is honored with the left, and Job brings up the rear. The usual difficulties of wind and water are encountered and surmounted, and the chamber behind the sheet finally attained in safety. The same medley of tone, however, still prevails. For example—“Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there,” says Mr. Slingsby, “we could but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode. A lofty and well lighted hall, shaped like a long pavilion, extended as far as we could see through the spray, and with the two objections, that you could not have heard a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the floor was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce imagine a more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who was disgusted with the world, and subject to dryness of the skin. In one respect it resembled the enchanted dwelling of the Witch of Atlas, where Shelley tells us,