AVERY.

I.

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,

Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,

Out of the hell of the rapids as 'twere a lost soul's cries

Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,

Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran

Raving round him and past, the visage of a man

Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught

Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.

Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung

Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rang.

II.

Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,

Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound,

And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon,

As it had been in some blessed trance, and now it is noon.

Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it strong and stanch,

And to the lines and the treacherous rocks look well as you launch

Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprent sides,

Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides,

Onward rushes the raft, with many a lurch and leap,--

Lord! if it strike him loose from the hold he scarce can keep!

No! through all peril unharmed, it reaches him harmless at least,

And to its proven strength he lashes his weakness fast.

Now, for the shore! But steady, steady, my men, and slow;

Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so, let her go!

Thronging the shores around stands the pitying multitude;

Wan as his own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to brood

Heavy upon them, and heavy the silence hangs on all,

Save for the rapids' plunge, and the thunder of the fall.

But on a sudden thrills from the people still and pale,

Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail

Caught on a lurking point of rock it sways and swings,

Sport of the pitiless waters, the raft to which he clings.

III.

All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways;

And on the shore the crowd lifts up its hands and prays:

Lifts to heaven and wrings the hands so helpless to save,

Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock and the ways

Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife

Straggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life,

Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon.

Priceless second by second, so wastes the afternoon.

And it is sunset now; and another boat and the last

Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely passed.

IV.

Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay

Maddening against the gate that is locked athwart his way.

"No! we keep the bridge for them that can help him. You,

Tell us, who are you?" "His brother!" "God help you both! Pass through."

Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud to him,

Unto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim;

But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering words are lost

As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed.

And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope

Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope;

Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry,

Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flying free;

Sees, then, the form--that, spent with effort and fasting and fear,

Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near,

Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and hurled

Headlong on to the cataract's brink, and out of the world.

"O Basil!" said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking the hush that best

praised the unknown poet's skill, "it isn't true, is it?"

"Every word, almost, even to the brother's coming at the last moment.

It's a very well-known incident," he added, and I am sure the reader

whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly every point of interest

about the place has killed its man, and there might well be a deeper

stain of crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching the

falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy

as the lightest-hearted tourist could desire. The abominable savages,

revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of

demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two

hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these

squalid devil-worshippers; the French planting the fort that yet guards

the mouth of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited

afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole Niagara country; the

struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of France

and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac, where a

detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the precipice

near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon the American

settlements in the Revolution by the savages who prepared their attacks

in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and of Lundy's

Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of the fall; the

savage forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and the blazing villages

on either shore in the War of 1812,--these are the memories of the place,

the links in a chain of tragical interest scarcely broken before our time

since the white man first beheld the mist-veiled face of Niagara. The

facts lost nothing of their due effect as Basil, in the ramble across

Goat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman's

histories,--those precious books that make our meagre past wear something

of the rich romance of old European days, and illumine its savage

solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of

mediaeval martyrdom,--and then, lacking this light, turned upon them the

feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed the lurid

picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles

of other times from the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They

were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long as their

own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining

fables. They pleasantly exercised their sympathies upon those who every

year perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power; only they

refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island,

who dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally

carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design

in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory;

though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet

not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of

the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon

Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the

corner-stone of the new temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands

every year. The shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a

deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they met

many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the hotels

should be so full, and that the wilderness should also abound in them;

yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of interest

and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing arms and

their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean upon the

other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and Isabel

emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the island,

and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran smooth

before breaking into the rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature in the

foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far from

unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground of every famous American

landscape; and when I think of the amount of public love-making in the

season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from

the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent

is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth century is the

golden age, and that we want very little of being a nation of shepherds

and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having

traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now

drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant

have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that

constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or rather of people

whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new

from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this

illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with

evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a

wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness of

pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three

little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out

into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges connect them

now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge

rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The

Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled

woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination

of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded

from exploring them. It wants no courage to do this, but merely

submission to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward

than the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no

human being had perhaps set foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge with

a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence,

through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the

heaving and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which at every

instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told

heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil another

revelation of character. Without the slightest warning she sank down at

the root of a tree, and said, with serious composure, that she could

never go back on those bridges; they were not safe. He stared at her

cowering form in blank amaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Then it

occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and he said,

"Well, I'll have you taken off in a boat."

"O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!" implored Isabel. "You see

yourself the bridges are not safe. Do get a boat."

"Or a balloon," he suggested, humoring the pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his knees at her side, and

took her hands in his. "Isabel! Isabel! Are you crazy?" he cried, as if

he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered in reply; he said,

to mend matters, that it was a jest, about the boat; and he was driven to

despair when Isabel repeated, "I never can go back by the bridges,

never."

"But what do you propose to do?"

"I don't know, I don't know!"

He would try sarcasm. "Do you intend to set up a hermitage here, and have

your meals sent out from the hotel? It's a charming spot, and visited

pretty constantly; but it's small, even for a hermitage."

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered that

he was not ashamed to make fun of her.

He would try kindness. "Perhaps, darling, you'll let me carry you

ashore."

"No, that will bring double the weight on the bridge at once."

"Couldn't you shut your eyes, and let me lead you?"

"Why, it isn't the sight of the rapids," she said, looking up fiercely.

"The bridges are not safe. I'm not a child, Basil. O, what shall we do?"

"I don't know," said Basil, gloomily. "It's an exigency for which I

wasn't prepared." Then he silently gave himself to the Evil One, for

having probably overwrought Isabel's nerves by repeating that poem about

Avery, and by the ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to

enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it; and she answered, "O no, it's

nothing but the bridges." He proved to her that the bridges, upon all

known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give way.

She shook her head, but made no answer, and he lost his patience.

"Isabel," he cried, "I'm ashamed of you!"

"Don't say anything you'll be sorry for afterwards, Basil," she replied,

with the forbearance of those who have reason and justice on their side.

The rapids beat and shouted round their little prison-isle, each billow

leaping as if possessed by a separate demon. The absurd horror of the

situation overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore, for

she might spring from his grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to

call for help; and what if nobody came till she lost her mind from

terror? Or, what if somebody should come and find them in that ridiculous

affliction?

Somebody was coming!

"Isabel!" he shouted in her ear, "here come those people we saw in the

parlor last night."

Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil's with her icy hand,

rose, drew her arm convulsively through his, and walked ashore without a

word.

In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly "repaired her drooping

head and tricked her beams" again. He could see her tearfully smiling

through her veil. "My dear," he said, "I don't ask an explanation of your

fright, for I don't suppose you could give it. But should you mind

telling me why those people were so sovereign against it?"

"Why, dearest! Don't you understand? That Mrs. Richard--whoever she

is--is so much like me."

She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfying statement, and

he thought he had better not ask further then, but wait in hope that the

meaning would come to him. They walked on in silence till they came to

the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a notice that persons have

been killed by pieces of rock from the precipice overhanging the shore

below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabel

declined to visit the Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but

was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower. "Thanks; no," said her

husband. "You might find it unsafe to come back the way you went up. We

can't count certainly upon the appearance of the lady who is so much like

you; and I've no fancy for spending my life on Terrapin Tower." So he

found her a seat, and went alone to the top of the audacious little

structure standing on the verge of the cataract, between the smooth curve

of the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Central Fall, with the

stormy sea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen through the

mists, crawling away between its lofty bluffs before. He knew again the

awful delight with which so long ago he had watched the changes in the

beauty of the Canadian Fall as it hung a mass of translucent green from

the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl up from the abyss, and

penetrate all its substance to the very crest, and then suddenly vanished

from it, and perpetually renewed the same effect. The mystery of the

rising vapors veiled the gulf into which the cataract swooped; the sun

shone, and a rainbow dreamed upon them.

Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge,

and here Basil saw an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone

to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss, who, when

he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank

bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that he

thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman took

this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a

distinguished phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had

equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

"On your bridal tour, I presume," he continued, as they approached the

bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain,

middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward

festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. "Well, this is my

third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife's been here once before on the

same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table Rock

with the others. Now that's all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move on?"

he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply, by

the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet pleasing

associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard's party sat at the table next Basil's, and they

were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious

dining-hall.

"Well, Kitty," the married lady was saying, you can tell the girls what

you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They'll

believe anything sooner than the truth."

"O yes, indeed," said Kitty, "I've got a good deal of it made up already.

I'll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all

parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most. I'm going

to have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long blond

mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he's got to do duty

in accounting for my missing glove. It'll never do to tell the girls I

dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny, I really

can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon

by their black servants."

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted

in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the

first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a

half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its

way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their

child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact did

not quite answer to the young lady's description of it, and yet it

certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of

bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he

used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to

find it so changed.

"Yes," he said, "I can't account for him except as the ghost of Southern

travel, and I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that

almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are

fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the

remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce. The

impoverished slave-holder is a pathetic figure, in spite of all justice

and reason, the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and it is of no

use to think of Andersonville in his presence. This gentleman, and others

like him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent the

money they did not earn like princes; they held their heads high; they

trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair; they received the homage of

the doughface in his home. They came up here from their rice-swamps and

cotton-fields, and bullied the whole busy civilization of the North.

Everybody who had merchandise or principles to sell truckled to them, and

travel amongst us was a triumphal progress. Now they're moneyless and

subjugated (as they call it), there's none so poor to do them reverence,

and it's left for me, an Abolitionist from the cradle, to sigh over their

fate. After all, they had noble traits, and it was no great wonder they

got, to despise us, seeing what most of us were. It seems to me I should

like to know our friend. I can't help feeling towards him as towards a

fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! I wonder how our colored

waiter feels towards him. I dare say he admires him immensely."

There were not above a dozen other people in the room, and Basil

contrasted the scene with that which the same place formerly presented.

"In the old time," he said, "every table was full, and we dined to the

music of a brass band. I can't say I liked the band, but I miss it. I

wonder if our Southern friend misses it? They gave us a very small

allowance of brass band when we arrived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder

what's come over the place," he said, as the Southern party, rising from

the table, walked out of the dining-room, attended by many treacherous

echoes in spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters

made.

After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House,

towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As

each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of

infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly

strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as a

demon; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the

business-like composure of the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added

to those successive sorceries by which Niagara gradually changes from a

thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all odds, too, the most

tremendous view of the Falls is afforded by the point on the drive whence

you look down upon the Horse-Shoe, and behold its three massive walls of

sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone, and the

smooth brink showing black and ridgy.

Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy's Lane? asked the driver

at a certain point on their return; but Isabel did not care for

battle-fields, and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence of his

former visit. "They have a sort of tower of observation built on the

battle-ground," he said, as they drove on down by the river, "and it was

in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, who had helped his countrymen

to be beaten in the fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible

account of the battle, asking me first if I had ever heard of General

Scott, and adding without flinching that here he got his earliest

laurels. He seemed to go just so long to every listener, and nothing

could stop him short, so I fell into a revery until he came to an end. It

was hard to remember, that sweet summer morning, when the sun shone, and

the birds sang, and the music of a piano and a girl's voice rose from a

bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with

battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been planted with cannon,

instead of potatoes and corn, and that where the cows came down the

farmer's lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men had befallen.

The blue and tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away rolled the

beautiful land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and at the foot of

the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past seemed only a

vagary of mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior at my elbow?--grieved

though I was to find that a habit of strong drink had the better of his

utterance that morning. My driver explained afterwards, that persons

visiting the field were commonly so much pleased with the captain's

eloquence, that they kept the noble old soldier in a brandy-and-water

rapture throughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing his memory, and

making the battle bloodier and bloodier as the season advanced and the

number of visitors increased. There my dear," he suddenly broke off, as

they came in sight of a slender stream of water that escaped from the

brow of a cliff on the American side below the Falls, and spun itself

into a gauze of silvery mist, "that's the Bridal Veil; and I suppose you

think the stream, which is making such a fine display, yonder, is some

idle brooklet, ending a long course of error and worthlessness by that

spectacular plunge. It's nothing of the kind; it's an honest hydraulio

canal, of the most straightforward character, a poor but respectable

mill-race which has devoted itself strictly to business, and has turned

mill-wheels instead of fooling round water-lilies. It can afford that

ultimate finery. What you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is the

apotheosis of industry."

"What I can't help thinking of," said Isabel, who had not paid the

smallest attention to the Bridal Veil, or anything about it, "is the

awfulness of stepping off these places in the night-time." She referred

to the road which, next the precipice, is unguarded by any sort of

parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we manage things

differently on our continent, and carriages go running over the brink

from time to time.

"If your thoughts have that direction," answered her husband, "we had

better go back to the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow

morning. It's late for it to-day, at any rate." He had treated Isabel

since the adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he felt

himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse.

"I'm not afraid," she sighed, "but in the words of the retreating

soldier, I--I'm awfully demoralized;" and added, "You know we must

reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this evening."