Surely it is an island of magic, unsubstantial, liable to go adrift and plunge into the canon.  Even in the forest path, where the great tree trunks assure one of stability and long immunity, this feeling cannot be shaken off.  Our party descended the winding staircase in the tower, and walked on the shelf under the mighty ledge to the entrance of the Cave of the Winds.  The curtain of water covering this entrance was blown back and forth by the wind, now leaving the platform dry and now deluging it.  A woman in the pathway was beckoning frantically and calling to a man who stood on the platform, entirely unconscious of danger, looking up to the green curtain and down into the boiling mist.  It was Mrs. Stubbs; but she was shouting against Niagara, and her husband mistook her pantomime for gestures of wonder and admiration.  Some moments passed, and then the curtain swung in, and tons of water drenched the Englishman, and for an instant hid him from sight.  Then, as the curtain swung back, he was seen clinging to the handrail, sputtering and astonished at such treatment.  He came up the bank dripping, and declaring that it was extraordinary, most extraordinary, but he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.  From this platform one looks down the narrow, slippery stairs that are lost in the boiling mist, and wonders at the daring that built these steps down into that hell, and carried the frail walk of planks over the bowlders outside the fall.  A party in oil-skins, making their way there, looked like lost men and women in a Dante Inferno.  The turbulent waters dashed all about them; the mist occasionally wrapped them from sight; they clung to the rails, they tried to speak to each other; their gestures seemed motions of despair.  Could that be Eurydice whom the rough guide was tenderly dragging out of the hell of waters, up the stony path, that singular figure in oil-skin trousers, who disclosed a pretty face inside her hood as she emerged?  One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue such a woman; but why take her there?  The group of adventurers stopped a moment on the platform, with the opening into the misty cavern for a background, and the artist said that the picture was, beyond all power of the pencil, strange and fantastic.  There is nothing, after all, that the human race will not dare for a new sensation.

The walk around Goat Island is probably unsurpassed in the world for wonder and beauty.  The Americans have every reason to be satisfied with their share of the fall; they get nowhere one single grand view like that from the Canada side, but infinitely the deepest impression of majesty and power is obtained on Goat Island.  There the spectator is in the midst of the war of nature.  From the point over the Horseshoe Fall our friends, speaking not much, but more and more deeply moved, strolled along in the lovely forest, in a rural solemnity, in a local calm, almost a seclusion, except for the ever-present shuddering roar in the air.  On the shore above