nder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by
the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed. All was darkness. Such a mad,
storming, roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed
my ears before. I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my
back. The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything,
the flood poured down so savagely. I raised my head, with open mouth,
and the most of the American cataract went down my throat. If I had
sprung a leak now, I had been lost. And at this moment I discovered that
the bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery
and precipitous rocks. I never was so scared before and survived it. But
we got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could
stand in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending
water, and look at it. When I saw how much of it there was, and how
fearfully in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.

I said to the guide, "Son, did you know what kind of an infernal place
this was before you brought me down here?"

"Yes."

This was sufficient. He had known all the horror of the place, and yet
he brought me there! I regarded it as deliberate arson. I then destroyed
him.

I managed to find my way back alone to the place from whence I had
started on this foolish enterprise, and then hurried over to Canada, to
avoid having to pay for the guide.

At the principal hotel I fell in with the Major of the 42nd Fusiliers,
and a dozen other hearty and hospitable Englishmen, and they invited me
to join them in celebrating the Queen's birthday. I said I would be
delighted to do it. I said I liked all the Englishmen I had ever
happened to be acquainted with, and that I, like all my countrymen,
admired and honoured the Queen. But I said there was one insuperable
drawback--I never drank anything strong upon any occasion whatever, and
I did not see how I was going to do proper and ample justice to
anybody's birthday with the thin and ungenerous beverages I was
accustomed to.

The Major scratched his head, and thought over the matter at
considerable length; but there seemed to be no way of mastering the
difficulty, and he was too much of a gentleman to suggest even a
temporary abandonment of my principles. But by-and-by he said:

"I have it. Drink soda-water. As long as you never do drink anything
more nutritious, there isn't any impropriety in it."

And so it was settled. We m