ring habitans, hung from these towers high over the long plunge
of the cataract. But one morning of the fatal spring after the first
winter's frost had tried the hold of the cable on the rocks, an old
peasant and his wife with their little grandson set out in their cart
to pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoring wires
suddenly lost their grip upon the shore, and whirled into the air; the
bridge crashed under the hapless passengers and they were launched from
its height, upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged, two hundred
and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss.

The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon low stone piers, so far
up the river from the cataract that whoever fell from it would yet have
many a chance for life; and it would have been perilous to offer
to replace the fallen structure, which, in the belief of faithful
Christians, clearly belonged to the numerous bridges built by the Devil,
in times when the Devil did not call himself a civil engineer.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad tale as he halted his
horses on the bridge; and as his passengers looked down the rock-fretted
brown torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudder
that ever she had set foot on that suspension-bridge below Niagara, and
to prove to Basil's confusion that her doubt of the bridges between
the Three Sisters was not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdom
concerning the unsafety of all bridges of that design.

From the gate opening into the grounds about the fall two or three
little French boys, whom they had not the heart to forbid, ran noisily
before them with cries in their sole English, "This way, sir" and led
toward a weather-beaten summer-house that tottered upon a projecting
rock above the verge of the cataract. But our tourists shook their
heads, and turned away for a more distant and less dizzy enjoyment of
the spectacle, though any commanding point was sufficiently chasmal and
precipitous. The lofty bluff was scooped inward from the St. Lawrence in
a vast irregular semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one within another,
sinking far into its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or meagrely
wooded here and there with evergreen. From the central brink of these
gloomy purple chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a
cloud,

"Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem."

I say a cloud, because I find it already said to my hand, as