can Indian, in his own land, I had seen. I am not about to get up any spasmodic enthusiasm concerning the Noble Savage. He is, I am aware, at a painful discount just at present, and I confess that his nobility is, in the main, nonsense, and he himself a nuisance. I have seen a good deal of him in Canada since my first meeting with the birdman with the duck-gun at Niagara. I have seen him five million strong-whole-blooded and half-blooded in Mexico, and I am bound to admit that according to our ideas of civilisation—and they need not be quite infallible ideas, after all-he is, at the best, but a poor creature. I have nothing favourable to say about the war paint, or the war path, or the war dance. The calumet of peace has, I know, been smoked to the last ashes. I give up the Noble Savage morally. I confess him to be a shiftless and degraded vagrant, who does not wash himself—who is not at all scrupulous about taking things which do not belong to him—who will get blind or mad drunk on rum or whiskey whenever he has a chance-who is not a much better shot than a white man, and who has only one special aptitude that for playing at cards, at which he will cheat you. But, fallen and debased as he is, not much more picturesque than an English gipsy, and quite as dishonest, nothing can rob him of a certain dignity of mien, a composure of carriage, and an imperturbability of countenance, which the descendant of a hundred European kings might envy. Nothing moves him, nothing excites his surprise, nothing excites him to merriment. A friend told me, that travelling once in Nova Scotia he came in an Indian village, where a chief was being installed in

office. He was invited to take part in the festivities, and was regaled at a grand banquet composed of one dish. What do you think it was? Conger eel, cut into pieces about four inches long, Indian corn and molasses; yet the manner in which the chief ladled out this horrible mess from a tin slop-pail was, according to my friend, the most dignified and imposing performance he had ever witnessed since, in days gone by, he had seen a Royal personage presiding at a public dinner. On the other hand, when Lord Aylmer was GovernorGeneral of Canada, he had occasion to receive a deputation of Indians from some remote part of the province. His lordship was a very merry nobleman, and something exceedingly ludicrous in the costume of one of the Sachems happening to strike him, he could not repress a smile. The deputation took no verbal notice of that which they doubtless held to be an insult, but immediately and silently withdrew, nor could they, by any offers of firearms, blankets, beads, or firewater, be induced to return.

And so this Red Man stood grave and immobile, surveying the Falls. His dress was a mean and bastard compromise between the past and the present; but in port and visage he was the same Indian who, with unquivering lip and unfaltering eye, looks upon the dying Wolfe in Benjamin West's picture. There he stood, statuesque and dumb, heeding me not, heeding nothing, seemingly, but his own thoughts. Of what may he have been thinking? Perhaps in this wise: "All this was once mine. The river and the Falls, the bank and the brake, all belonged to the Red Man. In their bark canoes my fathers shot the rapids more skilfully than the

VOL. I.

helmsmen of that black boat which puffs smoke from a pipe on its deck, and makes a noise like the whip-poor-will in pain. All this belonged to me, and now I am a vagrant and an outcast, and the white man chaffers with me for the birds I have slain." Poor copper-hued child of the wilderness! Perhaps he was listening for the flutter of a wing, and keeping a sharp look-out for the blue-bird of Canada. I went on my way, and saw him no more.

But he, and the gander, and the roar of the Falls haunted me for many winter nights. Have you not experienced, landing from a long sea voyage, the rocking, and tumbling, and oscillating motion of the ship which has brought you to your bourne, long after you are free from that thraldom? You are on dry land, on carpeted floors, on smooth turnpike roads, on paved streets-and yet you seem to be rolling and pitching as in the days when you strove to get your sea legs. So is it with Niagara. Shut your eyes tightly as you will, press down your fingers on the orbs; but in the eyes of your soul you will see the Falls still, plain and distinct as on the table of a camera obscura. Stop your ears, stop them with cotton, stop them with wax, but in the ears of your mind you will hear the dull, constant roar of the cataract. And I seem to see and to hear it now as I write.

CHAPTER VIII.

NIAGARA IN SUMMER.

THE burning American summer came, and with my travelling companion, whose head was not as white as the snows on the summit of Popocatapetl, I had been to Saratoga, and had seen its lions till we had grown somewhat sick of them. It was then we waited for a train at Schenectady, and, taking the New York Central, hied once more towards the Suspension Bridge and the Falls. It was six o'clock in the morning ere our eighteen hours' jolting and shaking came to an end. The State of New York, to those who are compelled to traverse it in a railway car, seems about the longest State that mortal ever waded through. You think you have given it the go-by, and are deep in the heart of Maine or Vermont, when, lo! the State of New York has you on the hip again. It must be longer than Upper Wimpole Street, which Sydney Smith on his death-bed considered the closest definition of a thing without end; and the New York Central resembles, in one sense, the London, Chatham, and Dover, for it is everywhere. This is the famous railroad which Mr. Dean Richmond "runs" as a political" masheen;" and out of the N.Y.C.R.R. have come many notable log-rollers, pipe-layers, and financeerers generally.

We were well out of the cars-for who is not well out of an American railway car, or can suppress a feeling of gratitude when he is quit of that penitential van? We had been unable to procure berths in the sleeping car, and had done our eighteen hours cooped up on those wretched little stools of repentance the which, for the purpose I presume of adding insult to injury, are often covered with crimson velvet and decorated with carving and gilding. What was the name of the cardinal whom Louis the Eleventh put in a cage so narrow, and so artfully constructed, that the miserable captive could neither sit, nor stand, nor lie at ease? Balue, was it not? Ah, but King Louis should have seen a passenger car on the New York Central, or any other Yankee railroad. That would have given him hints-even as Southey's Fiend gathered hints for improving the prisons of Tophet by inspecting a solitary cell in Coldbath Fields-and would have enabled him to give Balue additional "fits."

What an exquisitely beautiful morning it was! Racked and contused as we were by the merciless rail, how happy and cheery we felt at the knowledge that we had come to our journey's end, and for a whole week were about to enjoy Niagara. I could not be angry with anybody. I could not grumble at anything. I remembered, with a smile, a kind and hospitable friend-the kindest and most hospitable, indeed, of all Washington bankers, and in this every English traveller will bear me out-with whom I used to dine, and who would banter me with "Is the salt to your liking, sir?" "Do you find anything amiss in the bread, sir?" "Have the forks too many prongs, sir?" And at Niagara I felt