In another moment the guide disappeared behind the grand deluge, and, bewildered by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed.  All was darkness.  Such a mad, storming, roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears before.  I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back.  The world seemed going to destruction.  I could not see anything, the flood poured down so savagely.  I raised my head, with open mouth, and the most of the American cataract went down my throat.  If I had sprung a leak now, I had been lost.  And at this moment I discovered that the bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and precipitous rocks.  I never was so scared before and survived it.  But we got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water, and look at it.  When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.

I said to the guide, “Son, did you know what kind of an infernal place this was before you brought me down here?”

“Yes.”

This was sufficient.  He had known all the horror of the place, and yet he brought me there!  I regarded it as deliberate arson.  I then destroyed him.

I managed to find my way back alone to the place from whence I had started on this foolish enterprise, and then hurried over to Canada, to avoid having to pay for the guide.

At the principal hotel I fell in with the Major of the 42nd Fusiliers, and a dozen other hearty and hospitable Englishmen, and they invited me to join them in celebrating the Queen’s birthday.  I said I would be delighted to do it.  I said I liked all the Englishmen I had ever happened to be acquainted with, and that I, like all my countrymen, admired and honoured the Queen.  But I said there was one insuperable drawback—­I never drank anything strong upon any occasion whatever, and I did not see how I was going to do proper and ample justice to anybody’s birthday with the thin and ungenerous beverages I was accustomed to.

The Major scratched his head, and thought over the matter at considerable length; but there seemed to be no way of mastering the difficulty, and he was too much of a gentleman to suggest even a temporary abandonment of my principles.  But by-and-by he said: 

“I have it.  Drink soda-water.  As long as you never do drink anything more nutritious, there isn’t any impropriety in it.”

And so it was settled.  We met in a large parlour, handsomely decorated with flags and evergreens, and seated ourselves at a board well laden with creature comforts, both solid and liquid.  The toasts were happy, and the speeches were good, and we kept it up until long after midnight.  I never enjoyed myself more in my life.  I drank thirty-eight bottles of soda-water.  But do you know that that is not a reliable article for a steady drink?  It is too gassy.  When I got up in the morning I was full of gas, and as tight as a balloon.  I hadn’t an article of clothing that I could wear, except my umbrella.