The town half populated; the monster hotel closed; the swimming-baths, in which one could take a plunge into the active rapids safely enclosed in a perforated room, now fastened up for winter,--presented a great contrast to the noise and bustle of the American Niagara in the season. This is the time when the Indians enable the shopkeepers to accumulate their stores of bead and feather work; and a few squaws, dressed in a curious compromise between the garments of the civilised female and the simpler robes of the “untutored savage,” flitted through the snow from one dealer to another with their work. In some houses they are regularly employed all day, and come in from their village in the morning and go home at night when their work is done. The view of the Rapids from the upper end of Goat Island is not, to my mind, as fine as that obtained from the island on the British side higher up. The sight of that tortured flood, loaded with its charging lines of “sea horses,”--its surging glistening foam-heaps streaking the wide expanse which rolled towards us from a dull leaden horizon,--was inexpressibly grand and gloomy, and struck me more forcibly than the aspect of the Rapids had done in August, when I beheld them in a setting of rich green landscape and forest. On the whole, I would much rather, were I going to Niagara for the first time, select the Canadian side for my first view. It would be well never to look at the Falls, if that were possible, till the traveller could open his eyes from the remnant of the Table Rock on the Great Horseshoe; but curiosity will probably defeat any purpose of that kind. Still, the Horseshoe is grand enough to grow on the spectator day after day, even if there be some disappointment in the first aspect. The noise, though it shake the earth and air, is not of the violent overwhelming character which might have been expected from its effect on window-panes and shutters. As the voice of a man can be heard in the din of battle by those around him, so can even the low tones of a clear speaker be distinguished most readily close to the brink of a cataract, the roar of which at times is very audible, nevertheless, from twelve to fifteen miles away.