Is it not funny, the way they serve their Congress Water at the Cataract House?  They put a big lump of ice in a tumbler, take a bottle from a shelf, pour the warm, stale fluid, (tasting like perspiration, as one might fancy,) into this glass, and expect you to wait till it has grown cool enough to be palatable.  Well, if you wait, you lose what little life there is left in the stuff; and if you don’t, you’ll be sorry you hadn’t done so.

One may say, “You needn’t have ordered any Congress Water.”  Very well, but why not, provided I liked it?  The clerk said they kept Vichy, also, but I learned they were “out.”  I wish they had been out of Congress too.  “All right!” said I, “I shall enjoy my breakfast all the more, for I know that will make amends!” And it did.  The “salmon trout” was dry, as usual, but that breakfast was a good thing.  I enjoyed it, and my two niggers and my New York paper of day before, (for which I paid a cute looking boy in the hall ten cents, on my way to breakfast,) and was happy.

Not, my dear P., till I reached the “other side,” and had been inveigled into the Museum Hotel, and persuaded into those vile wrappings of oil-cloth, with the ponderous rubbers over my thick boots, and had stood around for some time, awaiting the pleasure of the very leisurely guide, sweating at every pore, (or nearly every one, for there are several millions, I believe, and I so hate exaggeration,) and trying to evade the glances of the amused bystanders, did I begin to realize the enormity of the imposition that had been practised on me.  Just fancy yourself, Mr PUNCHINELLO, in such a costume, taking a seemingly interminable walk in a hot sun, down ever so many steps, encased in those nasty articles of gear, in the company of several other helpless unfortunates, wishing with all your might yon were already there!”

“But the grandeur and glory of the adventure will console me!” I murmured.  Grandeur be hanged!  A fig for the “glory!” What! do you call this “going under the Falls,”—­that renowned journey, so full of peril?  Pooh! merely standing in a bath-tub and letting somebody pull the string!  You don’t get quite so wet; that’s all.  Where’s the “danger,” where’s the “glory,” of merely stepping under a little spirt from one end of the Falls, with plenty of room to stand, and no darkness, no mystery, no nothing.  Nothing but an overwhelming sense of being a cussed fool, and a simpleton, and a stupid, and a dunce!

Oh, the going back, after that! in the same loathed costume, inwardly justifying the laughter of the knowing loungers as you ascend among them, and cursing yourself as the chief among ten thousand (ninnies,)—­the one altogether idiotic.

Except for this enormous swindle, dear P., I should have enjoyed Niagara, and Niagara would doubtless have enjoyed me.  But this preposterous, disgusting, outrageous, ridiculous, contemptible, disgraceful, unsurpassable swindle prevented anything like a mutual understanding.  I saw green in the Falls, the Falls saw green in me.  The Falls kept coming down; I had already come down, (with my dollars,) and, in fact, was perpetually descending, with sums varying from twenty-five cents to four dollars and a half.