storm of a Fortalice by the Ice-king--Newark, or Niagara--Flags,
big and little--Views of American and of English
institutions--Blacklegs and Races--Colonial high life--Youth very
young.

Behold us again in Toronto at Macdonald's Hotel; and, as we shall have
to visit this rising city frequently, we shall say very little more
about it at present, but embark as speedily as possible on board the
Transit, and steam over to Niagara.

The Transit, a celebrated packet, now getting old, and commanded by a
son of its well-known owner, Captain Richardson, starts always in summer
at eight a.m. punctually, and makes her voyage by half-past eleven, at
which hour, on the 5th day of July, we once more touched the shore of
Newark, or Niagara Town, at the Dock Company's wharf, which we found had
been greatly damaged in the spring of the year by a most extraordinary
ice phenomenon.

At the breaking-up of the frost, the ice in the river Niagara, which
came down the river, packed near its mouth, and dammed it up so high at
Queenston, seven miles above and close to the narrows, that the upper
surface of the fields of ice was thirty feet above the level of the
river, there a quarter of a mile broad or more. The consequence was,
that every wharf and every building under this level was destroyed and
crushed. Every edifice on the banks, and among others a strong stone
barrack, full of soldiers, was stormed by the frost-king, during the
darkness of an awful night, and the front wall fairly breached and borne
down by the advancing masses of ice. The soldiers had barely time to
escape from the crashing and rending walls; and their cooking-house, a
detached building, some yards from the barrack and higher up the bank,
was turned over, as if it had been a small boat.

In the memory of man, such a scene had never occurred before, and
probably never will again; and I have been told, by those who beheld it,
that a more solemn display of natural power and irresistible might has
seldom been witnessed than that of the gradual grinding, heaving passage
of one great floe, or field, of thick-ribbed ice over the other, until
that summit was gained which could not be exceeded.

Then came the disruption, the roar, the rush, the fury, the foam, the
groaning thunder, and the river flood; the plunge and the struggle
between the solid and the liquid waters.

Truly, the thundering water was well named by the Indian of old--NE AW
GAR AW is very Greek