“A few paces—past groups of blithe tourists, past companies of somber Indian girls in blue blankets and high-crowned hats, with their gay wares spread out at their feet—brings you to the Biddle staircase, down which you wind to the foot of the precipice. The path to the left leads along the foot of the overhanging cliff, up to the verge of the Horseshoe fall, only a portion of whose circumference is visible from any point on the American shore. You are here close upon the fragments of rock that fell from just in front of the tower, in February, 1852, the latest of those changes which are slowly and almost imperceptibly altering the form and position of the falls. This fall of rock was seen by an artist who has given us a faithful picture of its effects. He was just recovering from an illness, and while sitting in his room at the Clifton House, on the opposite Canadian shore, he was startled by a crash, almost like that of an earthquake. Tottering to the window, he beheld the immense curtain of rock in front of the tower precipitated from its ancient hold, and lying in huge masses upon the ice below; while a few streams of water trickled down the brown cliff, where but a moment before nothing had been seen but a surface of dazzling ice. The water at this extremity of the fall descends in light feathery forms, contrasting finely with the solid masses in which it seems to plunge down the center of the sweeping curve. The tower is perched upon the very brink of the precipice, so close that the next fall of rock must carry it along with it. The path to the right from the foot of the staircase, leads to the entrance to the Cave of the Winds, which lies behind the central fall. It is hard to imagine how this cavern missed being called the ‘Cave of Æolus,’ by those classicists who have exhausted ancient mythology for appellations for our American scenery. But it has escaped this infliction; and the ‘Cave of the Winds,’ it is, and will be. From the little house close by the entrance, where the requisite changes of dress are made, you look down into an abyss of cold gray mist, driven ever and anon like showers of hail into your face, as you grope your way down the rocky slope. Haste not, pause not. Here is the platform, half-seen, half-felt amid the blinding spray. Shade of Father Hennepin, this is truly a ‘dismal roaring’ of wind and water. We are across, and stand secure on the smooth, shaly bottom of the cave. Look up: what a magnificent arch is formed by the solid rock on the one side, and the descending mass of water on the other. Which is the solider and firmer you hardly know. Yet look again—for it is sunset—and see what we shall see nowhere else on earth, three rainbows one within another; not half-formed and incomplete, as is the scheme of our daily life, but filling up the complete circle, perfect and absolute.