Préface (Avant-Propos)

This account of a journey to the falls of Niagara is nothing other than the copy of letters addressed to my mother, after her death, I found them again among her papers. She had carefully kept them. I have therefore copied out this narrative without changing anything in it, for my mother I omitted none of those details which could carry her in spirit to my side, and which would seem uninteresting and childish to indifferent people.

For more than half a century, everything has changed in the United States. The solitude of Niagara has been disturbed by the building of a suspension bridge, giving passage to railway trains. Factories have seized, as a motor, upon the power of the falls. The Americans more sensitive to money than to poetry have turned nature into a factory. — 1896

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