I clove my way to bed that night on the top landing through a horde of keen commercial travellers joyfully discussing all the business the exhibition would bring them. Next day I went to Niagara, by steamer, across the great lake. Toronto owes at least half its greatness to the Falls, and there should be, but I do not think there is, a really big monument to their discoverer, Father Louis Hennepin. Very likely, though, the discovery of Niagara was its own reward, especially for so inquisitive a man as that friar. He has himself confessed how, in the old days, when he was only a begging friar, sent by the Superior of his Order to beg for alms at the seaport of Calais, he used, in his curiosity, to hide himself behind tavern doors and listen to the sailors within telling of their voyages, while their tobacco smoke was wafted out and made him 'very sick at the stomach.' In the end he was the first white man to see the Falls, in the winter of 1687....
They were framed in a most gorgeous sunset { 90} when I saw them on an August day. The green and white foam swooped from a mountain of clouds all grey and gold--clouds piled fantastically into the furthest sky. No one seeing them in such a light could be disappointed with them, but I would forbid any more writers to write about them. Every man should be his own poet where the greater sights of the world are concerned. On second thoughts it is permissible to read Mr. Howells on the subject, and even Dickens, provided one is never likely to see them with one's own eyes. I saw the Falls at sunset, by starlight, and in the sunrise, and I can commend them at all these times. The river that drowned Captain Webb and was crossed by Blondin on the tight-rope, though extraordinary in its way, seemed to me comparatively unbeautiful and uninteresting. Any big sea on the Atlantic or Pacific is a finer sight and grips a man harder. I like a river quiet myself. Moreover, the villas above Niagara River give the landscape a domestic air in which its mad swirl seems only like an attempt to show off malignantly.
One of my pleasantest recollections of Niagara is a conversation I had with the porter at the hotel where I stopped on the Canadian side. He was an American negro, extremely urbane { 91} and chatty. He told me that he guessed I was an Englishman. It was pretty easy, he said, to tell that. I did not feel sure whether to feel flattered or not, but I felt sure later, when he introduced me to the lift-boy--a typical little stunted anæmic street arab from one of our northern cities--with a wave of the hand and the remark, 'Thar's one of your fellow-countrymen.' Afterwards, in self-defence, I steered the conversation towards Canada, and the porter, who regarded himself as an American citizen only, told me that the Canadians were a slow, stupid people, who could not be trusted of themselves to do anything but cultivate a little land badly.