“The path now begins to ascend the sloping bank, winding around huge bowlders, and among gay shrubs which the perpetual spray nourishes in luxuriant greenness, wherever there is a resting-place for a patch of soil. At last you reach the dilapidated staircase which descends the perpendicular face of the cliff, and clambering around its base upon a rotten and slimy plank, you find yourself below the overhanging mass of Table Rock. You are close at the edge of the falling water, which descends in a mass apparently as solid as though carved from marble. You now begin to comprehend the hight of the fall. It makes you dizzy to look up to the upper edge of the rushing column. You stand just midway between the top and the bottom. Above you hangs the imminent mass of Table Rock; below, far down by the wet and jagged rocks, is the seething whirlpool, where the water writhes and eddies as though frenzied with its fearful leap. Round and round it goes in solemn gyrations, bearing with it whatever floating object may have been plunged into its vortex. “A year ago this very month of August, a young woman walked in the cool gray morning down to the brink of the cliff and flung herself into the whirlpool below. So resolute was the leap, that she shot clear of the jagged rocks at the base, and plunged sheer into the water beyond. When the visitors came sauntering down to the fall, her body was seen whirling round and round in the mad eddies, now submerged for an instant, and then leaping up, as though imploring aid. A day or two afterward, I was one of a group to whom a rough-looking man was describing the scene. He told how he and two others had descended amid the blinding spray close to the foot of the fall. A rope was then fastened to his body, which was held fast from above by the others, while he groped his misty way down to the very edge of the waters, where he waited till they whirled the corpse close inshore. He then darted a spear with a spring-barb into the body, but the force of the current tore out the hold, and it drifted away. Again it came within reach, and again the hold of the spear was too weak to overcome the force of the current. A third time the body approached, and the spear was darted. This time it caught among the strong muscles of the thigh, and held, so that the body was drawn to shore. The narrator was a rough man, roughly clad, and told his story roughly; but there was in his voice a low thrill of horror as he told how he was obliged to cut the spear-head out of the flesh with his knife, before the weapon could be extracted: ‘It was too bad,’ said he; ‘but it couldn’t be helped.’ And it was with unconscious pathos that he told how they stripped off their own rough garments, and tenderly covered the poor maimed and mutilated body before they bore it up the bank. It was a commentary, wrought out into practice, upon Hood’s immortal ‘Bridge of Sighs.’