"I did hold firmly, but the trembling of my frame shook the tree and clinging shrubs with a dangerous vibration, and it seemed to me that their roots were slowly tearing out from the soil which held them in the cleft of the rock. This shook me with an awful terror; I tried to close my eyes and be still, but that was impossible. I saw the blue sky bending so calm and quiet above me. I saw the quivering greenness that clothed the rocky face of the precipice, and ten thousand tiny white flowers trembling through it so close that my face almost touched them. The fall, like a sheet of melted glass, rolled and plunged so near, that it seemed ready to leap upon me. My appalled eyes turned shuddering from a vast whirlpool of foam that rioted thirty feet beneath me, shooting forward, curving over, and plunging down great watery hollows, then leaping suddenly upward, as if maddened that their prey had not fallen at once into the white caldron of their wrath. "In vain my eyes closed upon all this threatening horror. Then all was darkness, and the roar of the fall became terrific. The spray swept over me like a storm of shooting diamonds, wetting my habit through and through till it dragged me downward with heavier weight and fresh peril. I could feel the drops falling like rain from my hair, and my poor hands grew cold as they clung to the vine. A cry broke from my lips. Surely the tree was uprooting beneath me. I could feel it giving way inch by inch. A handful of loose earth broke away and rolled over me, rattling down to the white gulf below. Shriek after shriek--oh, my God! they were smothered and lost in that roar of waters, and could warn no one of this new peril. I seized upon the wild vine higher up, and strove to press less heavily on that breaking tree; my foot found a crevice in the rock, and, forcing itself through the wet moss, in some degree sufficed to lessen the weight that was dragging me down to death. But still my support was slowly giving way, I could hear the small roots snap, and feel the earth break from around them. My hands were numb and cold, my brain began to reel, and ten thousand broken rainbows seemed shooting up from the falls, and tangling themselves around me, dragging me down--down--down.