analysis of noise becomes easy. One man hears in it the sound of the
Battle of the Nile-a statement not likely to be challenged, as the
survivors of that celebrated naval action are not numerous, the only one
we ever had the pleasure of meeting having been stone-deaf. Another
writer compares the roar to the sound of a vast mill; and this
similitude, more flowery than poetical, is perhaps as good as that of the
one who was in Aboukir Bay. To leave out Niagara when you can possibly
bring it in would be as much against the stock-book of travel as to omit
the duel, the steeple-chase, or the escape from the mad bull in a
thirty-one-and-sixpenny fashionable novel. What the pyramids are to
Egypt--what Vesuvius is to Naples--what the field of Waterloo has been
for fifty years to Brussels, so is Niagara to the entire continent of
North America.

It was early in the month of September, three years prior to the time I
now write of, when I first visited this famous spot. The Niagara season
was at its height: the monster hotels were ringing with song, music, and
dance; tourists were doing the falls, and touts were doing the tourists.
Newly-married couples were conducting themselves in that demonstrative
manner characteristic of such as responded freely to the invitation
contained in their favourite nigger melody. Venders of Indian bead-work;
itinerant philosophers; camera-obscura men; imitation squaws; free and
enlightened negroes; guides to go under the cataract, who should have
been sent over it; spiritualists, phrenologists, and nigger minstrels had
made the place their own. Shoddy and petroleum were having "a high old
time of it," spending the dollar as though that "almighty article had
become the thin end of nothing whittled fine:" altogether, Niagara was a
place to be instinctively shunned.

Just four months after this time the month of January was drawing to a