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26 THE GREAT LONE LAND.
this similitude, more flowery than poetical, is perhaps as
good as that of the one who was in Aboukir Bay. To leave
out Niagara when you can possibly bring it in would be as
much against the stock-book of travel as to omit the duel,
the steeple-chase, or the escape from the mad bull in a
thirty-one-and-sixpenny fashionable novel. What the pyramids
are to Egypt—what Vesuvius is to Naples—what the
field of Waterloo has been for fifty years to Brussels, so
is Niagara to the entire continent of North America.
It was early in the month of September, three years
prior to the time I now write of, when I first visited this
famous spot. The Niagara season was at its height: the
monster hotels were ringing with song, music, and dance;
tourists were doing the falls, and touts were doing the
tourists. Newly-married couples were conducting themselves
in that demonstrative manner characteristic of such
people in the New World. Buffalo girls had apparently
responded freely to the invitation contained in their
favourite nigger melody. Venders of Indian bead-work;
itinerant philosophers; camera-obscura men; imitation
squaws; free and enlightened negroes; guides to go under
the cataract, who should have been sent over it; spiritualists,
phrenologists, and nigger minstrels had made the place
their own. Shoddy and petroleum were having "a high old
time of it/* spending the dollar as though that ff almighty
article had become the thin end of nothing whittled fine:"
altogether, Niagara was a place to be instinctively shunned.
Just four months after this time the month of January
was drawing to a close. King Frost, holding dominion over
Niagara, had worked strange wonders with the scene.
Folly and ruffianism had been frozen up, shoddy and
petroleum had betaken themselves to other haunts, the
bride strongly demonstrative or weakly reciprocal had