Yet he had a strange, almost irrepressible, desire to make this voyage immediately after the steamer was put on below the Falls. The wish was only increased when the first _Maid of the Mist_ was superseded by the new and stancher one. He insisted that the voyage could be made with safety, and that it might be made a good pecuniary speculation.
He was a character--an original. Born on the banks of the Connecticut, in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, it was in the beautiful reach of water which skirts that city that he acquired his love of aquatic sports and exercises and his skill in them. He was nearly six feet in stature, with light chestnut hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion. He was a kind-hearted man, of equable temper, few words, cool, deliberate, decided; lithe as a Gaul and gentle as a girl. It goes without saying that he was a man of "undaunted courage." He had that calm, serene, supreme equanimity of temperament which fear could not reach nor disturb. He might have been, under right conditions, a quiet, willing martyr, and at last he bore patiently the wearying hours of slow decay which ended his life. His love of nature and adventure was paramount to his love of money, and although he was never pinched with poverty, he never had abundance.
He loved the water, and was at home in it or on it, as he was a capital swimmer and a skillful oarsman. Especially he delighted in the rapids of the Niagara. Kind and compassionate as he was by nature, he was almost glad when he heard that a fellow-creature was, in some way, entangled in the rapids, since it would give him an excuse, an opportunity, to work in them and to help him. As he was not a boaster, he made no superfluous exhibitions of his skill or courage, albeit he might occasionally indulge--and be indulged--in some mirthful manifestation of his good-nature; as when, on reaching Chapin's refuge for his rescue, he waved from one of its tallest cedars a green branch to the anxious spectators, as if to assure and encourage them; and when he returned with his skiff half filled with cedar-sprigs, which he distributed to the multitude, they raised his pet craft to their shoulders, with both Chapin and himself in it, and bore them in triumph through the village, while money tokens were thrown into the boat to replace the green ones.