Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having
traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now
drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant
have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that
constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or rather of people
whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new
from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this
illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with
evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a
wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness of
pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three
little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out
into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges connect them
now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge
rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The
Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled
woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination
of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded
from exploring them.
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