Make a capital picture of you; falls in the background.”  It was the local photographer urging them to succeed the young couple he had just posed at the brink:  the gentleman was sitting down, with his legs crossed and his hands elegantly disposed; the lady was standing at his side, with one arm thrown lightly across his shoulder, while with the other hand she thrust his cane into the ground; you could see it was going to be a splendid photograph.

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trusting as usual to his sympathy for perception of her train of thought, “Well, I’ll never try to be high-strung again.  But shouldn’t you have thought, dearest, that I might expect to be high-strung with success at Niagara if anywhere?” She passively followed him into the long, queer, downward-sloping edifice on the border of the grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood ready, and descended the incline.  Emerging into the light again, she found herself at the foot of the fall by whose top she had just stood.  At first she was glad there were other people down there, as if she and Basil were not enough to bear it alone, and she could almost have spoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasols and impertinent little boots, whom their attendant husbands were helping over the sharp and slippery rocks, so bare beyond the spray, so green and mossy within the fall of mist.  But in another breath she forgot them; as she looked on that dizzied sea, hurling itself from the high summit in huge white knots, and breaks and masses, and plunging into the gulf beside her, while it sent continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and crawled away in vast eddies, with somehow a look of human terror, bewilderment, and pain.  It was bathed in snowy vapor to its crest, but now and then heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of the Falls almost as far as the Canada side.  They remembered afterwards how they were able to make use of but one sense at a time, and how when they strove to take in the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear it; but as soon as they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in them vibrated to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it.  They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, and of a tendency of each to palter with the things perceived.  The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality, and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of careen marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as would hold them together; and again they could not discern if this course were from above or from beneath, whether the water rose from the abyss or dropped from the height.  The ear could give the brain no assurance of the sound that felled it, and whether it were great or little; the prevailing softness of the cataract’s tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious force or of prodigious volume.  It was only when the sight, so idle in its own behalf, came to the aid of the other sense, and showed them the mute movement of each other’s lips, that they dimly appreciated the depth of sound that involved them.