you intend visiting the former, and desire to go to the Clifton
House, the best hotel there, you are dropped at Mr. Lanty Mac Gilly's,
where the four roads meet, one going to the Ferry, one to Drummondville,
a village at Lundy's Lane, now cut off from the main road; the other you
came by, and the continuation of which goes to Chippewa, where a
steamer, called the Emerald, is ready to take you to the city of
Buffalo in the United States. As I shall return by way of Buffalo from
the extreme west of Canada, we will say not a word about any thing
further on this route at present than the Falls, and perhaps the reader
may think the less that is said about them the better.

But, gentle reader, although it be a well-worn tale, I had not seen the
Falls for five years, and I wish to tell you whether they are altered or
improved; and most likely you will take some little interest in so old a
friend as the Falls of Niagara; for you must have read about those
before you read Robinson Crusoe, and have had them thrust under your
notice by every tourist, from Trollope to Dickens. They say, _on dit_, I
mean, which is not translatable into English, that this is the age of
Materialism and Utilitarianism. By George, you would think so indeed, if
you had the chance of seeing the Falls of Niagara twice in ten years.
They are materially injured by the Utilitarian mania. The Yankees put an
ugly shot tower on the brink of the Horseshoe at the beginning of that
era, and they are about to consummate the barbarism, by throwing a wire
bridge, if the British government is consenting, over the river, just
below the American Fall. But Niagara is a splendid "Water Privilege,"
and so thought the Company of the City of the Falls--a most enlightened
body of British subjects, who first disfigured the Table Rock, by
putting a water-mill on it, and now are adding the horror of
gin-palaces, with sundry ornamental booths for the sale of juleps and
sling, all along the venerable edge of the precipice, so that trees of
unequalled beauty on the bank above, trees which grow no where else in
Canada, are daily falling before the monster of gain.

What they will do next in their freaks it is difficult to surmise; but
it requires very little more to show that patriotism, taste, and
self-esteem, are not the leading features in the character of the
inhabitants of this part of the world.

If the Colossus of Rhodes could be remodelled and brought to the Falls,
one leg