Among the rugged mountains of Potter County, in the northern part of Pennsylvania, the highest land in the State, are the springs feeding the headwaters of three noted rivers, seeking the ocean in opposite directions. The Allegheny flows westward and afterwards southward to the Ohio; the west branch of the Susquehanna goes eastward to break through the entire Allegheny chain in seeking the Atlantic; and the smaller stream, the Genesee, flows northward through New York between two long Allegheny ridges, the chief affluent of Lake Ontario. The Genesee passes through a valley of great beauty and gives water-power to many mills, a canal also being constructed to improve its navigation. After a romantic course of one hundred and fifty miles it empties into the lake at Charlotte, seven miles north of Rochester. For much of the distance its course is through a magnificent gorge, with a succession of cataracts that are renowned in American scenery. Where it first attacks the highlands of New York to break out of them, it plunges deeper and deeper down a series of grand cataracts at Portage. Here the Erie Railway, coming from the westward, has boldly thrown a stupendous bridge across the tremendous chasm and almost over the top of the highest cataract. The river makes a gorge in the yielding rocks, sinking from two hundred and fifty to six hundred feet deep, and here are the Portage Falls, one cataract after another making the stream-bed lower, the walls of the wild ravine rising almost perpendicularly. The railway, crossing at the most favorable place, has built one of the highest bridges in the country, elevated two hundred and thirty-five feet above the river, resting upon lightly-framed steel trusses. From the car windows the river can be seen far below in what seems a narrow fissure, the current boiling along and then tumbling down the cataract, the edge of which crosses the river diagonally almost beneath the bridge. The waters pour into a chasm seeming almost bottomless as the spray obscures it. The ravine extends northward, and in the distance the waters go over a second fall and then a third, the chasm finally curving around to the right, making a bend, closing the view more than a mile away, with an enormous wall of bare rock. The three cataracts fall respectively seventy, one hundred and ten and one hundred and fifty feet--called the Upper, Middle and Lower Portage Falls--and for several miles below, the river flows through the deeper ravine amid equally magnificent surroundings.