I have never been to America yet without going to Niagara.  The first time I saw the great falls I thought it all more wonderful than beautiful.  I got away by myself from my party, and looked and looked at it, and I listened—­and at last it became dreadful and I was frightened at it.  I wouldn’t go alone again, for I felt queer and wanted to follow the great flow of it.  But at twelve o’clock, with the “sun upon the topmost height of the day’s journey,” most of Nature’s sights appear to me to be at their plainest.  In the evening, when the shadows grow long and all hard lines are blurred, how soft, how different, everything is!  It was noontide, that garish cruel time of day, when I first came in sight of the falls.  I’m glad I went again in other lights—­but one should live by the side of all this greatness to learn to love it.  Only once did I catch Niagara in beauty, with pits of color in its waters, no one color definite—­all was wonderment, allurement, fascination.  The last time I was there it was wonderful, but not beautiful any more.  The merely stupendous, the merely marvelous, have always repelled me.  I cannot realize, and become terribly weak and doddering.  No terrific scene gives me pleasure.  The great canons give me unrest, just as the long low lines of my Sussex marshland near Winchelsea give me rest.

At Niagara William Terriss slipped and nearly lost his life.  At night when he appeared as Bassanio, he shrugged his shoulders, lowered his eyelids, and said to me—­

“Nearly gone, dear,”—­he would call everybody “dear”—­“But Bill’s luck!  Tempus fugit!”

What tempus had to do with it, I don’t quite know!

When we were first in Canada I tobogganed at Rosedale.  I should say it was like flying!  The start!  Amazing!  “Farewell to this world,” I thought, as I felt my breath go.  Then I shut my mouth, opened my eyes, and found myself at the bottom of the hill in a jiffy—­“over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar!” I rolled right out of the toboggan when we stopped.  A very nice Canadian man was my escort, and he helped me up the hill afterwards.  I didn’t like that part of the affair quite so much.

Henry Irving would not come, much to my disappointment.  He said that quick motion through the air always gave him the ear-ache.  He had to give up swimming (his old Cornish Aunt Penberthy told me he delighted in swimming as a boy) just because it gave him most violent pains in the ear.

Philadelphia, as I first knew it, was the most old-world place I saw in America, except perhaps Salem.  Its redbrick side-walks, the trees in the streets, the low houses with their white marble cuffs and collars, the pretty design of the place, all give it a character of its own.  The people, too, have a character of their own.  They dress, or at least did dress, very quietly.  This was the only sign of their Quaker origin, except a very fastidious taste—­in plays as in other things.