roves which keep the village back from the shores
of the river on the American side, and greatly help the sight-seer's
pleasure in the place. The exquisite structure, which sways so
tremulously from its towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth
where its cables sink into the ground, is to other bridges what the
blood horse is to the common breed of roadsters; ant now they felt its
sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them
as they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their
sympathy with the bridge's trepidation was too great for unalloyed
delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there;
and afterwards, at least, they would not have had their airy path seem
more secure.

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that sprung from the base
of the Falls with a mournful, tremulous grace, and a movement weird
as the play of the northern lights. They were touched with the most
delicate purples and crimsons, that darkened to deep red, and then faded
from them at a second look, and they flew upward, swiftly upward, like
troops of pale, transparent ghosts; while a perfectly clear radiance,
better than any other for local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under
the bridge the river smoothly swam, the undercurrents forever unfolding
themselves upon the surface with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all
round with faint lines of white, where the air that filled the water
freed itself in foam. What had been clear green on the face of the
cataract was here more like rich verd-antique, and had a look of
firmness almost like that of the stone itself. So it showed beneath
the bridge, and down the river till the curving shores hid it. These,
springing abruptly prom the water's brink, and shagged with pine and
cedar, displayed the tender verdure of grass and bushes intermingled
with the dark evergreens that comb from ledge to ledge, till they point
their speary tops above the crest of bluffs. In front, where tumbled
rocks and expanses of caked clay varied the gloomier and gayer green,
sprung those spectral mists; and through them loomed out, in its
manifold majesty, Niagara, with the seemingly immovable white Gothic
screen of the American Fall, and the green massive curve of the
Horseshoe, solid and simple and calm as an Egyptian wall; while behind
this, with their white and black expanses broken by dark foliaged little
isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed