Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/109

Rh omnibus; one could get up and down at pleasure. The cars communicate with each other by bridges, which allow the traveler to go from one end of the train to the other. At the appointed time, without seeing either a guard or a porter, without a bell, without any warning, the brisk locomotive, a real gem of workmanship, started, and we were whirled away at the speed of fifty miles an hour. But instead of being boxed up, as one is in European trains, we were at liberty to walk about, buy newspapers and books, without waiting for stations. Refreshment buffets, book-stalls, everything was at hand for the traveler. We were now crossing fields without fences, and forests newly cleared, at the risk of a collision with the felled trees; through new towns, seamed with rails, but still wanting in houses; through cities adorned with the most poetic names of ancient literature—Rome, Syracuse, and Palmyra. It was thus the Mohawk Valley, the land of Fennimore, which belongs to the American novelist, as does the land of Rob Roy to Walter Scott, glided before our eyes. For a moment Lake Ontario, which Cooper has made the scene of action of his master-work, sparkled on the horizon. All this theater of the grand epopee of Leather Stocking, formerly a savage country, is now a civilized land. The Doctor did not appreciate the change, for he persisted in calling me Hawk's Eye, and would only answer to the name of Chingachgook.

At eleven o'clock at night we changed trains at Rochester; the spray from the cascades fell over the cars in showers. At two o'clock in the morning, after having kept alongside the Niagara for several leagues without seeing it, we arrived at the village of Niagara Falls, and the Doctor conducted me to a most magnificent hotel, grandly named "Cataract House."

Niagara is not a stream, not even a river; it is simply a weir sluice, a canal thirty-six miles long, which empties the waters of the Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie into the Ontario. The difference in the level of these