bade me sit in the stern-sheets. Where we crossed the river was white
with foam, yet did not offer much resistance to a straight passage,
which brought us close to the outer edge of the American falls. The
rainbow vanished as we neared its misty base, and when I leaped ashore,
the sun had left all Niagara in shadow."

"A sound of merriment, sweet voices and girlish laughter, came dancing
through the solemn roar of waters. In old times, when the French, and
afterwards the English, held garrisons near Niagara, it used to be
deemed a feat worthy of a soldier, a frontier man, or an Indian, to
cross the rapids to Goat Island. As the country became less rude and
warlike, a long space intervened, in which it was but half believed, by
a faint and doubtful tradition, that mortal foot bad never trod this
wild spot of precipice and forest clinging between two cataracts. The
island is no longer a tangled forest, but a grove of stately trees, with
grassy intervals about their roots and woodland paths among their
trunks.

"There was neither soldier nor Indian here now, but a vision of three
lovely girls, running brief races through the broken sunshine of the
grove, hiding behind the trees, and pelting each other with the cones of
the pine. When their sport had brought them near me, it so happened
that one of the party ran up and shook me by the band,--a greeting which
I heartily returned, and would have done the same had it been tenderer.
I had known this wild little black-eyed lass in my youth and her
childhood, before I had commenced my rambles.

"We met on terms of freedom and kindness, which elder ladies might have
thought unsuitable with a gentleman of my description. When I alluded
to the two fair strangers, she shouted after them by their Christian