IF ADAM and Eve had started in life outside the Garden of Eden, and had subsequently been ushered into it through an opening in a high board fence, at which opening stood a gate-keeper, demanding twenty-five cents each before they might enter to gaze upon the beauties within: if, when once within, vociferous hack men had clamored for their patronage, vieing with each other as to who should take them "the complete drive about the Garden": if, in short, civilitation had been there before them, would there have been such great cause for grief when they were finally banished ? Quien sabe ?

If, four hundred years ago, Vasco Nufiez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus of Darien and discovering on its thither side the vast and boundless ocean, had found his route marked with sign-boards warning him to "prepare to discover something," would he have realized so fully the glory and majesty of that sea when he finally stood upon its shore ? Quien sabe ?

If the first sentient human being who gazed upon Niagara had journeyed to it per railway express; had run a gauntlet of hackmen ; had then gone down through a mean street of catch-penny shops ; bad been stopped by hawkers at the doors of '•curio" stores and importuned to buy a thousand and one things that bear no manner of relation to the falls ; if he had finally entered to the very presence of the falls through a trim park, guarded by sentinels; found signboards, directing him to the best "points of view," and others cautioning him to"keep off the grass," would he finally have approached the cataract in the calm and receptive frame of mind which enables - and which alone enables - one to become wholly embued with the spirit of such a scene ?

Dios sabe !

If Niagara was ever encompassed and belittled by such drawbacks, we may well pardon the primitive man who beheld it under such conditions, because he could see in it no more than "a big waterfall".

We, who live in a more enlightened age, find it difficult to believe that Niagara ever was beset by such conditions; but history tells us authoritatively that, during the nineteenth century, taste had fallen so low that it was made a " show place ;" was photographed, lithographed, advertised, excursioned, ad nauseam.

Now, it is sufficient for us to know that Niagara exists, and when any individual of us feels moved to gaze upon its impressive features, we start in quest of it, as did our forebears for the sword Excalibur, or the Holy Grail, or the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.

But away back before our time, and before the nineteenth century, with its pinchbeck civilization, and be' fore the primitive man, Niagara existed. And one day an Autochthone, Son of the Earth, wandering the wide world over, came face to face upon it. Now, this was but a poor untutored savage, not a man with our vast development of brain and mind and reasoning power - only a poor being with an instinct. This being watched the mass of falling waters, and instinct told him that was power. He listened to the musical roar of the waters, and instinct told him it was the voice of that power. Standing below the cataract, instinct told him that the waters came from the unfathomable nowhere ; and standing above, instinct could only guess that they passed into the infinite beyond. So the being called the cataract a Great Spirit, and fell down and worshipped it.

Now, I wish I had been that being. I admit that he had never heard the falls extolled; had never heard the falls adjectivized ; so could form only his own dim conception of them. He had never seen a picture of them; never heard them scientifically or geologically explained; was even so ignorant as to imagine they meant something - had some lesson to convey. Perhaps he stood there a long time, the unbroken forest stretching everywhere about, no other presence besides himself and that awful and mysterious spirit of the waters. It did not occur to him that a tourist of enterprise could " do *' the falls in two hours, and have ample time then to exhaust the vocabulary of admiring adjectives and quarrel with the hackmen into the bargain. But as I have said, he was only a savage ; but again, I wish I had been he ! B.

Niagara, A. D. 1990.

The Editor's Outlook.