On Friday, 13th May, the landlord of the Clifton House was notified of the coming of the party. His house was closed, awaiting the opening day, but Mr. Cotham, scorning the word "impossible," and trenching on the reservations of the Sabbath, set to work, telegraphed to New York for waiters, cooks, and domestics, and papered, painted, and fixed up and dusted so energetically, that when the starving travellers were delivered at his house, they found the interior as dry, warm, and comfortable as if they had been lodged--I had nearly in my Chauvinism written in any English--but will stay in any good hotel at the height of the season. There was a splendid--that is the word--stove in the hall. It was called "The Crowning Glory," and it looked so bright and cheerful, and threw out such a pleasant glow, that it gained instant favour, and its fellows are now warming up English and Scotch interiors. Even the "Museum," inevitable adjunct of such scenes as Niagara, was open, and the good lady was quite ready to sell any number of photographs, fossils, feathers, Indian nick-nacks, warm purse belts, mocassins, and the like, but generally the establishments on the British side looked dank and mouldy. We went to bed, to the thunder of the waters and to the clatter of all the window-shutters, in the hope of a fine day to-morrow--and awoke to find it was not realised. _May 17th._--"Twenty golden years ago"--not that they, or any of them, brought gold to me--since I stood on the esplanade at Clifton House with Augustus Anson, who was fresh from the sunny South and Washington, and another Britisher on his travels! There were few visitors then, for it was winter time. The river, struggling with the bonds of frost, cleft its way between snow-covered banks, bearing triumphantly through the narrowed channel floes of ice which were churned into creamy waves and foam in the wild leap into the gulf, which now was hidden by dense clouds of vapour and drifting rain and fog--cold, raw--and I thought it was incomparably the grandest and the "purest" sight that human eye could see. Above a bright blue sky. Below all the landscape was clad in white--trees, and fields, and house-tops--no other colour anywhere visible save the green of the rushing river, almost of emerald hue, and the stark peaks of the reefs of rocks. Somehow the spectacle was not so striking now. There was only one colour, lead, everywhere, except the Humming-top and the blackened ruins of a factory over on the American side. Stay! What is that rising out of the broken water? I fixed my glass on it, and by all that is horrible I made out a monster advertisement of a quack medicine painted in gigantic letters many feet in height on a huge frame of wood above the Falls. The monster seized the moment when an ice bridge had formed from the shore to one of the rocky islands, and had sent his emissaries across to erect the hideous thing, and when the ice was swept away it was out of the power of anything but