the
boiling foam under the Horseshoe. On the deck are pigmy passengers in
oil-skin suits, clumsy figures, like arctic explorers. The boat tosses
about like a chip, it hesitates and quivers, and then, slowly swinging,
darts away down the current, fleeing from the wrath of the waters, and
pursued by the angry roar.

Surely it is an island of magic, unsubstantial, liable to go adrift and
plunge into the canon. Even in the forest path, where the great tree
trunks assure one of stability and long immunity, this feeling cannot be
shaken off. Our party descended the winding staircase in the tower, and
walked on the shelf under the mighty ledge to the entrance of the Cave of
the Winds. The curtain of water covering this entrance was blown back
and forth by the wind, now leaving the platform dry and now deluging it.
A woman in the pathway was beckoning frantically and calling to a man who
stood on the platform, entirely unconscious of danger, looking up to the
green curtain and down into the boiling mist. It was Mrs. Stubbs; but
she was shouting against Niagara, and her husband mistook her pantomime
for gestures of wonder and admiration. Some moments passed, and then the
curtain swung in, and tons of water drenched the Englishman, and for an
instant hid him from sight. Then, as the curtain swung back, he was seen
clinging to the handrail, sputtering and astonished at such treatment. He
came up the bank dripping, and declaring that it was extraordinary, most
extraordinary, but he wouldn't have missed it for the world. From this
platform one looks down the narrow, slippery stairs that are lost in the
boiling mist, and wonders at the daring that built these steps down into
that hell, and carried the frail walk of planks over the bowlders outside
the fall. A party in oil-skins, making their way there, looked like lost
men and women in a Dante Inferno. The turbulent waters dashed all about
them; the mist occasionally wrapped them from sight; they clung to the
rails, they tried to speak to each other; their gestures seemed motions
of despair. Could that be Eurydice whom the rough guide was tenderly
dragging out of the hell of waters, up the stony path, that singular
figure in oil-skin trousers, who disclosed a pretty face inside her hood
as she emerged? One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue
such a woman; but why take her there? The group of adventurers stopped a
moment on the platform, with the opening into the misty ca