Rensselaer Gazette, Volume 3, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1860 — EDITORIAL CORRESPONENCE. [ARTICLE]

EDITORIAL CORRESPONENCE.

Table Rock, March 7, 1860. Steaming down the banks of Niagara iron Buffalo, one asks himself a thousand times, can this river, so calm, so beautiful, 60 placid, be the “Roaring Waters” o. a thousand Indian legends? Can this river so bestudded with island gems, so dotted with whitewinged pleasure boats, be the veritable Niagara of ten thousand stories learned in boyhood! Can this river, with hanks so low and green, with “verytliing so placid, so homelike, be the repository of such untold wealth of geologic knowledge, pointing bock with the unerring fiinger of science to the time when God said. “Let the dry land appear!” \etso it is. It rolls on in sluggish majesty, a mighty river, the outlet oi four of our inland seas, until it reaches the brink of the precipice, then pitches into the deep abyss beneath where we now st. We can sit here with our feet in the water and watch it lazily pitching over, while one hundred and sixty-nine feet beneath us it is seething and boiling like a cauldron; laslied into white' foam, while the spray is falling thick upon us

We have not space to describe the Falls as we would like to. The American falls (the falls on the American side of Goat Island,) are “small potatoes;” the water is comparatively shallow—probably five to eight leet deep—is broken into a thousand sheets and jets by the roughness of the surface of the precipice; but the Canada Fulls—the Horse Shoe Falls—are three times as long, five times as deep, and flow over unbroken sheet,smooth as a mirror and green ss the deep sea. Toe name is derived from the shape being that of a horse The greatest depth of water being in the middle has naturally worn the rock away ‘aster than at the sides, thus it lias gradually assumed the shape of a horse shoe. A lew years ago a condemned vessel, drawing twenty feet of water, was run over these falls to test the depth, and it passed over without touching. Entering one of the the towers constructed for the purpose, we went down, and down, and down, until we began - o snuff the air to see if we could discover any traces of brimstone; but failing to do so, we concluded that the place where they used that article so profusely was still a little lower,and th«» we were only going to the leet of the falls, Here a grand sight bursts u ();)n us as we emerge from the tower. Table Rock overhangs us, and beside us is the great sheet of water, under which we go, resolved to get our “money back.” The scene here is intv pressible grand, a hundred and fifty feet above you, you see the sheet of water pitching out from the sharp point of rocks, describing a graceful semicircle above, then p.tching into the boiling flood beneath you. Near the fa’is is still discernabie a part of the platform from which Sam Patch leaped into the boiling waters below, came up with clothes slightly damp, paddled to shore, “pocketad the rocks,” and went on his way. Still farther down, and near the suspension bridge, stand the stakes where liiondin tied iris rope across the chasm, and performed the unp ualolied feats with which the readers of the Gazette are already familiar. The banks are here two hundred and twenty-five feet high, ami twelve hundred feet (four hundred yards.) from bank to bank; and yet across this n,igh(y chasm he carried a man five pounds heavier than himself; carried a stove, stopped and.cooked omeletts, eat his dinner,drank,iStc.; crossed it at night—a dark night, at that—ami did sundry other feats that we didn't attempt to imitate, and don’t expect to, and says that he will this summer cross it on stilts. Still lower down—two miles beiow the falls—stands,-''or rather hangs the Susp nsion Bridge, the great wonder of the world; one of the glories of the present age; on - : of the greatest triumphs of sience and art combined. The bridge, proper, being the distance between the, abutments, is 850 leet long—2B4j yards. The main cables are anchored 64 teet deep in the solid rock, then pass up over the tops of towers some 50 leet high. These cables are some six or eight inches in diameter, formed of small wires, twisted into small cables, then these again are twisted into a large cable, which in )•§ turn is wrapped with small wfre, which in its turn is covered with an impenetrable coating of gutta per.’ha. To these cables is suspended the gieat br-i Ige, two hundied ai.d fifty feet above the water. The bridge is some tv. e.jiy feet wide, is constructed with a wagon way beneath the railroad tr. ck. We stood about the middle of it while an immense freight train thundered past over our head, but could not discern the slightest motion, except that treinulousness incident to all bridges on the passage of a heavy load.

A friend of ours once remarked that “God and man had each here exet ted their highest powers, nod it was hard telling which had beat.” VVe quote the expression without indorsing it; but there is here united one o! the eublimest works of God, and one of the grandest triumphs of Art; a work of God that elevates ones mind, gives him nobler perceptions of the power of Deity; and a triumph of art that gives one nobler ideas ot man, of his mental power, and higher conceptions of what may be the ultimate destiny of the race, when all its capabilities are fully developed. Stanley, king of the Gypsies, died last week, near Madison, Ind., where the tribe are now in winter quarters.