of some long-waistcoated redcoat are not as
valuable incentives to correct legislation as that historic "bauble" of
our own constitution.

Meantime we must away. Boston and New York have had their stories told
frequently enough-and, in reality, there is not much to tell about them.
The world does not contain a more uninteresting accumulation of men and
houses than the great city of New York: it is a place wherein the
stranger feels inexplicably lonely. The traveller has no mental property
in this city whose enormous growth of life has struck scant roots into
the great heart of the past.

Our course, however, lies west. We will trace the onward stream of empire
in many portions of its way; we will reach its limits, and pass beyond it
into the lone spaces which yet silently await its coming; and farther
still, where the solitude knows not of its approach and the Indian still
reigns in savage supremacy.

NIAGARA--They have all had their say about Niagara. From Hennipin to
Dilke, travellers have written much about this famous cataract, and yet,
put all together, they have not said much about it; description depends
so much on comparison, and comparison necessitates a something like. If
there existed another Niagara on the earth, travellers might compare this
one to that one; but as there does not exist a second Niagara, they are
generally hard up for a comparison. In the matter of roar, however,
comparisons are still open. There is so much noise in the world that
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.