I know not by what seduction overcome, but, somehow, so it happened, that one of my companions, on our return to the outer air and light, was led to sacrifice himself on a tarboggin, and yielded to a demon guide. I watched him toiling on, with painful steps and slow, doggedly up the path towards the slippery summit, and, when he had gained it, I slid down below to observe the result of the experiment, and judge whether it looked pleasant or not. He was but an item among many, but I knew he was among the _braves des braves_, and had received a baptism of fire in the trenches of Sebastopol, which had rained a very font of glory in India, and scarcely paled in China. I watched him assuming the penal attitude to which the young tarbogginer is condemned, and after a balance for a moment on the giddy height, his guide gave a kick to the snow, and down like a plunging bomb flew the ice-winged Icarus. He passed me close; I could see and mark him well. Never, to judge from facial expression, could man have been in deadlier fear. With hard-set mouth, staring and rigid eyes, and aspect quite antipathetic to pleasure, he careered like one who is falling from a house top, and his countenance had scarce assumed its wonted placid look when I met him gasping and half faint. And yet he had the astounding audacity to say, “It was delicious. Never had a more delightful moment,” when he came back pale and panting from his flight. We returned from the Falls by a hilly, rough road over the bank of the Lake, and arrived at our hotel in time to dress for dinner, to which I was invited at the house of a Canadian gentleman, I think an Englishman by birth, who entertained us right hospitably. There is a wonderful calm in the conversation of the Canadians, perhaps a little too much so, but it is a relief from the ambitious restlessness of the common American. The Canadian mind suffers as the mind of every country which is not a nationality must suffer, and caution assumes the place of enterprise. If the Americans knew the business of diplomacy a little better, and could but restrain the democratic vice of boastful threatening and arrogant menace, they could have alienated Canada from our cold rule long ago, even though Canada would have lost by the change many privileges and a cheap protection to her industry, commerce, and social expansion.