I did the
first moment I saw him!"

CHAPTER XXVII.

SOCIETY AND SHOULDER-STRAPS AT THE FALLS--TOM LESLIE ANNEXING
CANADA--MEETING OF THE NEW YORKERS--ANOTHER RENCONTRE, A MYSTERIOUS
DISAPPEARANCE AND A GENERAL WONDER.

Tom Leslie was not left to loneliness and his own resources very long at
the Cataract, for Walter Lane Harding reached Niagara at noon on Monday,
having left New York on Sunday evening. Though even had Leslie been left
to his "own resources," these resources were somewhat more numerous than
usual, and he was never much in the habit of being so bored by Time as
to be obliged to lay plots against its life. In the first place--no,
that should be the _second_ place--he had his duties as a
newspaper-correspondent at a leading and fashionable resort, which
entailed a letter every day, but which did not entail, let us say, the
chronicling of the details of hops and evening assemblies, after a
manner somewhat scandalously prevalent, with descriptions of the
"charming dress worn by Miss A----," the "elegance and grace of the
accomplished Miss B----," and all the other disgusting and indecent
Jenkinsism of the initials, together with fulsome laudations of the
table and even the laundry of the hotel, leading to the impression that
the correspondent is upon free board and even free _washing_! Our
cosmopolitan had outlived that phase of callow journalism, long before;
and the managing-editor would have been a bold one who should now have
proposed to him to re-enter that most contemptible of all literary
harness. What he was to write and what he _did_ write, catching up the
prevailing topics of conversation and tones of feeling, with sensational
descriptions of scenery and incident interspersed like under-tones to
joyous music,--men who have hearts, brains and breeding will at once
recognize, and others will never know under any detail of information.

What Tom Leslie found it necessary to do in the _first_ place, was to
write a letter per day, and occasionally two, to a certain lady
temporarily located at West Falls, Oneida County, that lady having very
kindly given him her address with permission to use it, and having
promised to answer these epistles with brief and maidenly little notes
of her own. When it is said that as early as Monday he received one of
those notes, and that for an hour thereafter he had very indefinite
ideas as to which end of the human figure was intended for the purposes
of locomo