The sight of the St. Lawrence as we crossed over, roaring and foaming more than a hundred feet below us, and rushing between the precipitous banks on which the bridge rests, gave one a sort of “_frisson_:” it looked like some stream of the Inferno--the waters, black and cold, lashed into pyramids of white foam, and seeming by their very violence to impede their own escape. Some distance below the bridge, indeed, they rise up in a visible ridge, crested with high plumes of tossing spray; but it is related as a fact that the steamer “Maid of the Mist,” which was wont to ply as a ferry-boat below the Falls, was let down this awful sluice by a daring captain, who sought to save her from the grip of certain legal functionaries, and that she got through with the loss of her chimney, after a fierce contest with the waters, in which she was whirled round and buffeted almost to foundering. At that moment the men on board would no doubt have surrendered to the feeblest of bailiffs for the chance of smooth water. About one hundred years ago, the spot where we now stood was the scene of continual struggles between the Red man, still strong enough to strike a blow for his heritage, and the British. It was on the 14th September, 1764, that the Indians routed a detachment at Niagara, and killed and wounded upwards of two hundred men; and their organisation seemed so formidable that Amherst was glad to make a treaty with the tribes through the instrumentality of Sir W. Johnston. The colonists then left on us the main burden of any difficulty arising from their great cupidity and indifference to the rights of the natives. In ten years afterwards they were engaged in preparing for the grand revolt which gave birth to the United States and to the greatest development of self-government ever seen in the world. As they were setting about the work of wresting the New World from the grasp of the monarchical system, Cook was exploring the shores of the other vast continent in the Southern Sea, where the spirit of British institutions, with the widest extension of constitutional liberty, may yet successfully vindicate the attachment of a great Anglo-Saxon race to the Crown. There are many in America who think the colonies would never have revolted if the French had retained possession of Canada, and, indeed, it is likely enough the Anglo-Saxons would have held to the connection if the Latin race had been sitting upon them northwards; but the political accidents and the military results which expelled the fleur-de-lys from Canada, doubtless created an unnatural bond of union between the absolutist Court of St. Germains and the precursors of Anacharsis Clootz in the colonies. To the seer there might have been something ominous in the coalition.