digious sums are charged for them, and it riled me, so to speak, to find at the head of the bridge leading to Goat Island one of these "museums" of curiosities kept by a great hulking, bearded Yankee, who was turning in the dollars as though he were dry goods selling in Bleecker-street, New York, and entering in a huge waste book the sales effected by two pretty, slender, Yankee girls, his assistants. There he was at the back of the "museum," in a railed-off counting-house, and very much did he resemble a huge spider in his web. A counting-house and a set of books at Niagara! Fancy taking stock" of Nature, and posting up the Infinitely Beautiful! But this is the way with the Yankees. There never was such a mistake as to call them an industrious people. Shrewd, ingenious, active, energetic, enterprising they are, if you will; but they won't do a stroke of work if they can help it. They like "bossing." They prefer to "run the machine"-to stand on the bridge speakingtrumpet in hand, instead of slaving in the stoke-hole. For them the counting-house, where they can post up the profits at leisure to others the actual handiwork. If there is any hard work to be done they hire an Irishman, a German, or a negro to do it; and I dare say that hack-driver chafed at the task of taking the reins, and looked forward to the day when he should " run a livery-stable of his own, as a preparatory : * "To run" is a term which is so purely a modern American locution, that I cannot let it pass without brief comment. It means, to start, organise, and conduct a given undertaking. You may "run" anything—a railroad, a bank, a school, a newspaper, a quack medicine, a spiritualist lecture, a gas-works, a giant, a dwarf, a locomotive engine, a galantee-show, or an administration. "I run this government," said Mr. Abraham Lincoln to a friend who was remonstrating with him on some ministerial escapade, step to being nominated Minister to Russia or Secretary of the Treasury. "Excelsior" has in the States often a very queer signification; and I shall never forget a conversation I once had on this head with a remarkably shrewd, clearsighted New Englander. We were speaking of the Dignity of Labour. "The Dignity of Labour be darned!" coolly remarked my interlocutor; "there ain't no dignity at all about it. It's much more dignified to make a hundred thousand dollars a year out of a royalty on a patent. If there ain't no other way than to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, why you've got to do it; but I never knew a man yet that wasn't glad to get rid of his labour and to hire folks to do it, or that didn't look back upon the days he had to labour as a cussed bad time. I've often heard a rich man say that he was proud of having been a journeyman bricklayer, but I never heard one say that he'd like to be a journeyman bricklayer again. If labour was such a dreadful dignified thing, why should we be all in such an almighty hurry to become foremen and masters? Say." And, indeed, I think that on both sides the Atlantic a great deal of cant has been talked about the "dignity of "and I alone am responsible for its shortcomings." Finally, you may “run” a religion. I was talking to a clerical gentleman, on board a steamer, of the little foothold which the sect known as Universalists, and of whom Dr. Chapin is so eloquent an exponent at New York, seems to have obtained in Boston. "Yes, sir," replied the clerical gentleman; "I guess Universalism's pretty well played out in the State of Massachusetts. A friend of mine he run a chapel in that connection for six months down to Boston, but she never paid working expenses. Well, sir, he concluded to clear out; and now he's got a good old Congregationalist concern running on the same premises, and paying her way handsomely." Item-you also "run" a candidate for Congress or the Presidency. labour." We know that it is the lot of many of us, and we are told on the highest authority that it is meant, not as a blessing, but as a punishment; but to assert that about the grandest and noblest thing in the world is to work sixteen hours a day for fifteen shillings a week is often a convenient delusion, fostered by people who are not compelled to labour for the consolation of those who are. Niagara in summer, it need scarcely be said, abounds with photographers, and you may have your carte de visite taken with the actual Falls-Horseshoe or American-as a background. The drawback to this is that the light is behind you, and that you generally appear in the photograph as black as a sweep. Then there are the bird-stuffing shops and the ice-cream saloons, by scores; and on the U. S. side almost every way-side cottager has Pie to sell, and candy too. Bars are plentiful, but are kept hidden. There are organ-grinders too, and you may hear the valse from Faust contending with the steady music of the Falls. I am glad to say that the Falls have the best of it. Finally, there is one great plague and nuisance on both sides of the river, in the shape of a legion of guides and hotel-touters who are neither submissive nor good-natured like their European brethren, but twenty times more importunate, and withal dictatorial and occasionally insolent. I don't know how the penal laws stand hereabout with regard to throwing an hotel-touter over the Falls of Niagara. In the opinion of Mr. Artemus Ward it might be "arson in the third degree;" but I can scarcely fancy the authorities would be very hard on an outraged tourist if he sent an impudent guide down the Grand Rapids. They bore your life out. They want you to see or to buy everything—to put on a waterproof dress and go under the Falls, to ascend the Belvedere and look over the Falls, to see where the hermit was drowned and where the Caroline was burnt; to drive out to the Observatory and Brock's Monument, and the Burning Springs; to go here and there, and to pay everywhere. A lively French Canadian, gossiping to me about Niagara, remarked, “It is a horror. It is a Barnum Museum with a vente à l'encan. It is full of brigands who ask you to buy. I am asked to buy the skull of le Général Brock. I am asked to buy the sword of Monsieur de Salaberry. He not kill there. I am ask to buy, what you call, a racoon; and, horror of horror, one miserable, he say, 'Sare, you buy one piece of the pantaloon of Mr. Sam Patch, who jump over the Fall, and break his neck."" There is one thing you do not see at Niagara-literature. With some difficulty, at a few of the museums, you may obtain an indifferent guide-book, and the Hamilton and U. S. newspapers are cried about by newsboys when the mail trains come in; but, beyond skimming through the telegrams, nobody reads at Niagara. You may lounge, you may loafe, you may saunter, you may moon, you may potter, you may eat lotuses, you may smoke, you may enjoy your kef, you may flirt, you may dance, you may drink; but you must not, or rather you cannot, study. There is a great open book before you, a book whose pages are infinite, whose lore is untold, and whose teaching Eternal. CHAPTER IX. A NIGHT AT NIAGARA. The Do you remember that wonderful night-picture in the "Sartor Resartus," when the sage of Weissnichtwo ascends to his garret watch-tower, and takes a survey of the city? Asmodeus, when he lifted the house-tops off, and showed the student what Madrid was doing—all her gaieties and all her wickedness-has a keen insight; but the High-Dutch pedant imagined by Thomas Carlyle transcends even the lame devil in sweep and vigour of observation. He leaves nothing out. He sees it all. The night camera is of the lucidest. courtiers at the Residenz bowing and scraping in the wax-lit saloons; the dowagers squabbling over their whist and their "æsthetic tea;" the equerries whispering soft nothings to the maids of honour behind the heavy crimson windowcurtains; the professor in his studio, moistening his seventeenth pipe of tobacco with his sixteenth mug of bock-beer, as he collates the Pandects of Justinian with the Belfast Town and Country Almanack; the sceptic proving to an admiring conclave in yellow beards and blue spectacles that the idea of a Cosmic Creator is a delusion, and that the Bible is a mythus-poor sceptic, he will be obliged to believe to |