Thoseannual bills

ByMark Twain

These annual bills! these annual bills! 
How many a song their discord trills
Of “truck” consumed, enjoyed, forgot,
Since I was skinned by last year’s lot!

Those joyous beans are passed away;
Those onions blithe, O where are they? 
Once loved, lost, mourned—­now vexing ills
Your shades troop back in annual bills!

               And so ’twill be when I’m aground
               These yearly duns will still go round,
               While other bards, with frantic quills,
               Shall damn and damn these annual bills!

Niagara [ Written about 1871.]

Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort.  The hotels are excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant.  The opportunities for fishing are not surpassed in the country; in fact, they are not even equaled elsewhere.  Because, in other localities, certain places in the streams are much better than others; but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and so there is no use in your walking five miles to fish, when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful nearer home.  The advantages of this state of things have never heretofore been properly placed before the public.

The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant and none of them fatiguing.  When you start out to “do” the Falls you first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of the Niagara River.  A railway “cut” through a hill would be as comely if it had the angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom.  You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of the water.  After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but you will then be too late.

The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids—­how first one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the other, and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder—­and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of traveling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which.  But it was very extraordinary, anyhow.  It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a word or alter a sentence or a gesture.

Then you drive over to Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having the railway-train overhead smashing down onto you.  Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.