“It is strange how little of direct human interest is connected with Niagara. One would have supposed that it would have been a sacred spot with the Indians; but, with the exception of a few graves on the upper extremity of Goat island, no special memorial of the aborigines exists here. The falls have been known to the white race for too short a time to gather around them legendary associations. One or two points are associated with the memory of a young Englishman who, something like a score of years ago, set up as the ‘Hermit of the Falls.’ A picturesque little break in the rapids between Goat island and one of the rocky islets known as the Three Sisters, has been named from him the ‘Hermit’s cascade.’ It is a lovely spot, by the side of which one may lie under the overarching trees, and while away the noontide hour, lulled into dreamy slumber by the deep voice of the cataract. This hermit seems hardly worthy of being made the hero of the falls. Little is told of him except that he was fond of music and of pacing by night along the margin of the river; that he was alike indisposed for human society and for clean linen. It is said, indeed, that he was accustomed to record his musings in Latin, but as no fragments of these were discovered after his death, we may set the story down as apocryphal. A deeper tragic interest is attached to a tale, now some three years old, which will be told you as you stand by the margin of the lesser fall. A party of visitors stood here, in gay discourse. Among them were a young man and his affianced bride, and with them a laughing child. The young man, catching up the child, said sportively to her, ‘Now I shall throw you over;’ when she, gliding from his hold in affright, half real and half feigned, slipped, and falling, plunged headlong into the stream; he sprang after, but the current was stronger than his strength, and swept them both down the smooth slope, and over the fall. Their bodies, mangled and bruised, were recovered from the rocks below. “The pedestrian can hardly find a pleasanter summer day’s ramble, than that along the river to Lewiston, descending on the American side, and returning by the opposite bank. For a mile below the falls, where the channel is narrowest, the current is so smooth, that one might fancy he was gazing down into some quiet tarn embosomed in the mountains, were it not that you catch the white margin of the lower rapids just where the suspension bridge stretches its slender line from the summits of the opposing cliffs.”