They bore your life out. They want you to see or to buy everything to put on a waterproof dress and go under the Falls, to ascend the Belvedere and look over the Falls, to see where the hermit was drowned and where the Caroline was burnt; to drive out to the Observatory and Brock's Monument, and the Burning Springs; to go here and there, and to pay everywhere. A lively French Canadian, gossiping to me about Niagara, remarked, "It is a horror. It is a Barnum Museum with a vente à l'encan. It is full of brigands who ask you to buy. I am asked to buy the skull of le Général Brock. I am asked to buy the sword of Monsieur de Salaberry. He not kill there. I am ask to buy, what you call, a racoon; and, horror of horror, one miserable, he say, 'Sare, you buy one piece of the pantaloon of Mr. Sam Patch, who jump over the Fall, and break his neck.""

There is one thing you do not see at Niagara-literature. With some difficulty, at a few of the museums, you may obtain an indifferent guide-book, and the Hamilton and U. S. newspapers are cried about by newsboys when the mail trains come in; but, beyond skimming through the telegrams, nobody reads at Niagara. You may lounge, you may loafe, you may saunter, you may moon, you may potter, you may eat lotuses, you may smoke, you may enjoy your kef, you may flirt, you may dance, you may drink; but you must not, or rather you cannot, study. There is a great open book before you, a book whose pages are infinite, whose lore is untold, and whose teaching Eternal.

CHAPTER IX.

A NIGHT AT NIAGARA.

The

Do you remember that wonderful night-picture in the "Sartor Resartus," when the sage of Weissnichtwo ascends to his garret watch-tower, and takes a survey of the city? Asmodeus, when he lifted the house-tops off, and showed the student what Madrid was doing—all her gaieties and all her wickedness-has a keen insight; but the High-Dutch pedant imagined by Thomas Carlyle transcends even the lame devil in sweep and vigour of observation. He leaves nothing out. He sees it all. The night camera is of the lucidest. courtiers at the Residenz bowing and scraping in the wax-lit saloons; the dowagers squabbling over their whist and their "æsthetic tea;" the equerries whispering soft nothings to the maids of honour behind the heavy crimson windowcurtains; the professor in his studio, moistening his seventeenth pipe of tobacco with his sixteenth mug of bock-beer, as he collates the Pandects of Justinian with the Belfast Town and Country Almanack; the sceptic proving to an admiring conclave in yellow beards and blue spectacles that the idea of a Cosmic Creator is a delusion, and that the Bible is a mythus-poor sceptic, he will be obliged to believe to

morrow morning in the existence of his washerwoman, when she comes battering at his door for her little account: Gretchen in her attic, unloosing her bodice, or plucking the leaves from the flower-stalk with a "loves me, loves me not;” the nurse that is asleep, and the sick man that lies awake, staring at the wall-paper; the baby that is dying, and the baby that is being born; the beaten schoolboy forgetting his stripes in balmy slumber, with his peg-top under his pillow; the thieves in the night-cellar counting their booty; the landlord piling up his empty beer mugs, and reckoning up the entries on his slate; the tired-out dog, creeping under the lee of a barn, to dream of a paradise of bones with fat and gristle lying thick upon them; the students reeling home, chanting the Gaudeamus igitur more or less out of tune and rhythm; the beggar emptying his wallet, and unwinding the bandages from his apocryphal sores; the peasants slowly trooping, trudging townwards beside their lumbering waggons, laden with the milk and eggs and poultry which are to feed the great human hive to-morrow; the sentinel pacing up and down in front of the barracks, his bright bayonet gleaming in the moon-light; and the three men in the gaol dungeon who are to be hanged to-morrow, pressing their hot heads against the bars, staring out at the darkness -the forerunner of the greater blackness which is to comeand sucking in their last mouthfuls of air and life; these are among the things which Herr Teufelsdrökh might have seen or figured to himself from his eyrie. Some of them I think he has really set down in inimitable Carlylian prose; but I have lost the hang of the phrases. It is so long since I read

VOL. I.

P

the "Sartor Resartus," and the only copy I possess is so many thousand miles away.

I would that some Herr Teufelsdrökh, or some philosopher with his breadth of thought and sharpness of purview, would mount with me this night to the cupola which dominates the Clifton House, and tell me what is going on on either side of the Falls of Niagara. For I feel that my pen is but a cripple, hobbling painfully over the paper as I strive to give shape and coherence to the thoughts that stir me. What should there be, it may be asked, to describe beyond the usual peace and cheerfulness and tranquillity which reign here? Niagara is the quietest of places. Beyond the continual roar of the waters, which, from its continuity, is at last suggestive of perfect stillness, there is scarcely a sound to be heard. A few miles up the country, and the brightest and noisiest birds. abound; but here I miss the feathered songsters. Save at sunrise and just before sunset, and for a very short time, they seem to shun the Falls. Perhaps the roar frightens them. Perhaps the spray. And yet I think that an eagle, flapping majestically over the great expanse of tumbling foam between Terrapin Tower and the Horseshoe, would be a grand and terrible sight. The noise of wheels is seldom heard at Niagara by night. After sundown so much as a buggy will seldom venture out, for there are no public gas-lamps, and the roads, running along the very edges of the precipices, are destitute either of parapets or of palings. A false step, a startled horse, a drunken driver, and over you go, a hundred and fifty feet, to worse than Tarpeian destruction. And, again, that steady, persistent coronach, which the cataract is always

chanting, is sufficient, thank goodness! to drown the abominable screech of the railway whistle, and that unearthly stertorous outcry peculiar to American locomotives. Trains may rattle over the Suspension Bridge, but you hear them not. The cataract absorbs all.

Like Eutychus in his third loft, I have drowsed to sleep while the Falls were preaching their eternal sermon; but happily there is a railing to my high-up verandah, and I do not fall, to be taken up dead. I look out and find the night very dark, starless, and moonless. I cannot even see the Falls, although I never cease to hear them. Only far away, where I know the opposite river bank to be, and then again farther to the horizon, there are sparsely dotted here and there some little pins'-points of yellow light. Those I know must be in houses. I sit up very late in my loft. By twos or threes the little pins'-points disappear; and at last the only light left is the glowing crimson of my cigar tip. Then I shut out the smell of Niagara-for it has a smell, a bracing, hardy, almost salt-water odour-and its bodily presence, for the wind drives the spray over to the Clifton House, and covers your garments with tiny pellicles of moisture, that sparkle like diamond-dust; but the sound I cannot shut out, nor would I if I could. Then I turn into my room, where the bright lamp is the glass globe trembles from the omnipresent concussion caused by the Falls-and go to work.

I want some one to tell me what is going on over there where the lights were, and below and around me where all is dark-who the people are, and of what they are thinking, this most momentous night. Failing the guiding counsel of