160 LETTER XIII. DEPARTURE FROM GENESEE.-FALLS OF THE GENESEE RIVER. SINGULAR BRIDGE.-AMERICAN INNS.-OPENING Niagara, September, 1819. MY DEAR FRIEND, WE left Genesee on a lovely morning, that breathed the first freshness of autumn; our conveyance one of those light wagons universal in these states; many a kind parting glance we threw back upon the fair valley, and on the roofs which sheltered so much worth, and seemingly so much happiness. Our route, after some miles, crossed the great western road, and traced the course of the Genesee to within four miles of its discharge into Ontario. Here the river makes three considerable falls. At the head of the first stands the flourishing young town of Rochester, and at the head of the third one of minor fame, hight Carthage. A singular fate seems to pursue the latter colony. A farmer with whom I fell into conversation, informed me that it had first assumed the more modest appellation of Clyde, from the resemblance that some travelled settler had discovered between the neighbouring fall of the Genesee and that of the Clyde at Stone Byres; which resemblance, by-the-bye, allowing for the superior dimensions of the American river, is striking enough. After some time the new occupants received information that there existed an older settlement of that name in the same county; and, to rectify the confusion that this occasioned in the post-office, the Scots changed themselves into Punicians; but now, delenda est Carthago; it is discovered that there are two more infant Carthages, claiming the right of primogeniture. There is, it must be confessed, the strangest confusion of names in the western counties of this state that ingenuity could well imagine. In one district, you have all the poets from Homer to Pope, nay, for aught I know, they come down to Byron; in another, you have a collection of Roman heroes; in a third, all the mighty cities of the world, from the great Assyrian empire downwards; and, scattered among this classic confusion, relics of the Indian vocabulary, which, I must observe, are often not the least elegant, and are indisputably always the most appropriate. For the Roman heroes, bad, good, and indifferent, who in one district are scattered so plentifully, the new population is indebted to a land-surveyor, and a classical dictionary. Being requested, in parcelling out the lots, to affix a name to them, the worthy citizen, more practised in mensuration than baptism, shortly found his ingenuity baffled, and in despair had recourse to the pages of Lempriere. There is something rather amusing in finding Cato or Regulus typified by a cluster of wooden houses; nor, perhaps, are the old worthies so much disgraced as some indignant scholars might imagine. I met with one name on my route which somewhat surprised me, and which struck me as yet more inappropriate than the sonorous titles of antiquity, nor was I ill pleased to learn that it had occasioned some demur among the settlers. I thought that I had left Waterloo, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the streets, bridges, waltzes, ribands, hotels, and fly-coaches of Great Britain and Ireland. When objections were made to the founder of the 23 little town flourishing under this appellation, the story goes, that he called to his aid the stream of water which turned the wheel of his mill, gravely affirming, that he had that in his eye, and not the battle in his thoughts, when he christened the settlement. "The name speaks for itself," said he, with a humourous gravity peculiar to his native district of New-England-"Water-loo." If the name did not speak for itself, it was impossible not to let him speak for it; and so his neighbours turned away laughing, and the title of Waterloo stands more undisputed than that of poor Carthage. The falls of the Genesee are well worth going fifty miles out of your way to look at. The first is a noble cascade of ninety feet. Seen from the bottom, (to get to which we had to traverse a marsh and a score of mill-streams,} I have since thought is a sort of miniature of Niagara ;but this is wofully comparing small things to great. It is, however, a lovely sheet of water, and truly grand when you have not seen the wonder of nature that is now roaring in my ears. I believe we should have enjoyed the scene more, if the swamp, and the slime, and the mud, had not suggested rattlesnakes to the fancy of my companion. The apprehension was every way groundless; at least we saw no rattlesnakes; and these reptiles, when seen, I believe are seldom seen in mud, but among rocks moist with clear water. The second fall is inconsiderable compared to that either above or below. The third, though not upwards of eighty feet, is the most picturesque of the whole. The effect is, at present, singularly heightened by a stupendous bridge, thrown across the chasm, just below the basin of the fall, in the manner of that over the Wear at Sunderland. The chord of the arch, as I was informed, is upwards of 300 feet; the perpendicular, from the centre to the river, 250. We were desirous of viewing it from the bottom of the chasm; but to do this it seemed neces sary to go two miles farther down the river to seek a boat," which even then, we were assured, it would be but a chance if we found. To descend to this spot and wait this chance, daylight would hardly have served us. To see what we could, we scrambled a fourth of the way down, first by means of the wood-work of the bridge, and then by advancing cautiously along the shelving edge of the precipice, resting our weight on one hand, until we reached an acute angle, formed by the roots of a blasted pine, which afforded us a narrow footing, while the broken stem yielded us support. Having assumed this position, which, had we duly con: sidered we should perhaps not have ventured upon, we gazed up and down with a sensation of terror, that I do not remember to have felt in an equal degree more than once in my life. Beneath us, on either hand, the precipice now shelved perpendicularly, or rather we were projected over it, so that a pebble would have dropped into the gulf of water below. To the left, we looked upon the falling river; beneath us, was the basin, broad, deep, and finely circular; opposite, the precipice answering to that we stood upon; on our right was the bridge, suspended as it were in mid air. We were on a level with the spring of the arch, and I shuddered to observe that, on the opposite side, projecting over the precipice, the beams which sustained it seemed to rest on a hair's breadth. Tracing also the semicircle with my eye, I perceived that it was considerably strained, about 20 feet on the same side from the centre. Afterwards, on crossing the bridge, we found several heavy logs placed over the spot to prevent the springing of the arch. You cannot conceive the horror with which we gazed upwards on its tremendous span. After a while, it appeared as if in motion; and the impulse was irresistible which led us to shut our eyes, and shrink as in expectation of being crushed beneath its weight. I cannot yet recall this moment without shudder ing. Our sight swimming; our ears filled with the stunning roar of the river, the smoke of whose waters rose even to this dizzy height; while the thin coating of soil which covered the rock, and had once afforded a scanty nourishment to the blasted tree which sustained us, seemed to shake beneath our feet. At the time I judged this to be the work of busy fancy. To restore our confused senses, and save ourselves from losing balance, which had been the loss of life, we grasped the old pine with considerable energy, and it was at last, with trembling knees, and eyes steadily fixed upon our footsteps, neither daring to look up nor down, that we regained the height from which we had descended. Having regained it, I thought we never looked more like fools in our lives. Crossing the bridge, (which brought us down not quite to the level we had sought by a more perilous descent on the other side,) we walked round upon a fine carpet of verdure, kept always fresh by the spray from the basin beneath, till we stood above the brink of the fall, and nearly facing the arch. While making this circuit, we again shuddered, perceiving, for the first time, that the point we had descended to on the opposite side, had a concealed peril more imminent than those which had so forcibly affected our imagination. The earth beneath the old pine, being completely excavated, and apparently only held together by one of its roots. A young man, who the next day became our fellow traveller, told me that he had seen us take this position with such alarm, that his blood ran cold for many minutes after we left it; adding, that he had observed the earth crumble beneath our weight, and strike in the water below. I know not if his fancy had been as busy as ours in exaggerating our perils, but I will confess that they were sufficient to startle me from sleep twenty times during the ensuing night in all the horrors of tumbling down precipices, and falling through bridges in the manner of the sons of men, as seen |