It is a question whether the barrel-cranks made any money by their foolhardy feats. That nothing interests callous men like the risk of a human life is undoubtedly true and has been proved by the whole history of amusement. The interest must depend on sight. Nobody would pay merely to know that at a specified hour Blondin was risking his life a hundred miles off. The man in the cask would not be seen, and to see a closed cask go bobbing about down five miles of rapids would not be an exciting amusement, more especially as, after two or three successful trials, the notion of any imminency or inevitableness of actual danger would disappear from the spectator's mind. Captain Webb, of course, expected his speculation to pay him; but then, it was in a somewhat different way. He did not expect any money from those who gazed from the shore, but believed,--as did also the speculators who paid him--that if he swam Niagara, he would revive the waning interest in his really splendid feats of customary swimming. Copying somewhat the idea that Graham had developed so successfully, George Hazlett and William Potts, also coopers of Buffalo, made a trip through the Rapids in a barrel of their own construction on August 8, 1886. The barrel they used more closely resembled the familiar type of barrel, having no unusual features of form. In this same barrel used by the two coopers, Miss Sadie Allen and George Hazlett made a trip through the Niagara Gorge on November 28, 1886. There was then, I believe, a cessation of the barrel-fiends, who, nevertheless, re-appeared in the twentieth century. At the end of the summer of 1901, Martha E. Wagenfuhrer, the wife of a professional wrestler, announced that she would go through the river in a barrel, the date of September 6th being selected, possibly because the woman believed that she might have a President of the United States in her audience, for on that day President McKinley visited Niagara. Quite a crowd collected, for she was the first woman to try the feat alone. She was rescued after being in the water over an hour. It was nearly six o'clock in the afternoon [to quote the New York _Times_ of September 7, 1901,] when the barrel containing Martha E. Wagenfuhrer was set adrift on the lower Niagara River, to be carried by the currents into the rapids and vortex of the Whirlpool. The trip through the rapids was quickly made, but the rescue from the Whirlpool was delayed. Night fell before the barrel was recovered, and the woman's friends had availed themselves of the help of a powerful searchlight to illuminate the rushing tossing waters of the pool. She started at 5.56 o'clock, and it was 7 o'clock when the barrel was landed. The head of the cask had to be broken in in order to get the woman out. She was in a semi-conscious condition. Before entering the barrel she had indulged freely in liquor, but when she got out her first call was for water.