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156 this intercourse, studiously avoiding society, though there seemed in his nature nothing of moroseness or misanthropy. On the contrary, he showed kindness to even the humblest animal. Birds instinctively learned it, and freely entered his dwelling, to receive from his hands, crumbs or seeds.

But the absorbing delight of his existence was communion with the mighty Niagara. Here, at every hour of the day or night, he might be seen, a fervent worshipper. At grey dawn, he went to visit it in its fleecy veil; at high noon, he banqueted on the full splendor of its glory; beneath the soft tinting of the lunar bow, he lingered, looking for the angel's wing, whose pencil had painted it; and at solemn midnight, he knelt soul-subdued, as on the footstool of Jehovah. Neither storms, nor the piercing cold of winter, prevented his visits to this great temple of his adoration.

When the frozen mists, gathering upon the lofty trees, seemed to have transmuted them to columns of alabaster, when every branch, and shrub, and spray, glittering with transparent ice, waved in the sun-beam its coronet of diamonds, he gazed, unconscious of the keen atmosphere, charmed and chained by the rainbow-cinctured Cataract. His feet had worn a beaten path from his cottage thither. There was, at that time, an extension of the Terrapin Bridge, by a single shaft of timber, carried out ten feet over the fathomless abyss, where it hung tremulously, guarded only