A ROAR FROM NIAGARA.

DEAR PUNCHINELLO:--Having been reminded, by your recent notes on
Niagara, that there is a cataract of that name, possessed of height and
depth and breadth and volume and other well-known characteristics of a
genuine Waterfall, I thought I would go and see it for myself. Not that
I doubted your statements--which, indeed, are handsomely supported by
familiar statistics,--but certainly there is a charm in treading the
ground once trod by Greatness, breathing--well not the same air, I hope,
but some of the same kind,--viewing the identical scenes, and being
swindled by the self-same parties, that had just occasioned your
animated comments.

I don't know a charm at all comparable with that of being swindled in
the midst of fine scenery, when the funds and enthusiasm still hold out,
and the sense of actually getting the worth of one's money is not yet so
blunted by transactions calculated to awaken Thought, as to have lost
the power of increasing one's felicity. That the intelligent lad who
drove me was in league with every one of the parties who were stationed
here and there with the sole apparent purpose of receiving fifty cents
from visitors, I was loth to believe, though nothing could have been
plainer, if one had happened to think of it from the start.

Is it not funny, the way they serve their Congress Water at the Cataract
House? They put a big lump of ice in a tumbler, take a bottle from a
shelf, pour the warm, stale fluid, (tasting like _perspiration_, as one
might fancy,) into this glass, and expect you to wait till it has grown
cool enough to be palatable. Well, if you wait, you lose what little
life there is left in the stuff; and if you don't, you'll be sorry you
hadn't done so.

One may say, "You needn't have ordered any Congress Water." Very well,
but why not, provided I liked it? The clerk said they kept Vichy, also,
but I learned they were "out." I wish they had been out of Congress too.
"All right!" said I, "I shall enjoy my breakfast all the more, for I
know _that_ will make amends!" And it did. The "salmon trout" was dry,
as usual, but that breakfast was a good thing. I enjoyed it, and my two
niggers and my New York paper of day before, (for which I paid a cute
looking boy in the hall ten cents, on my way to breakfast,) and was
happy.

Not, my dear P., till I reached the "other side," and had been inveigled
into the Museum Hotel, and persuaded into those vile wrappings of
oil