YEARS ago those who visited Niagara Falls were interested in seeing Table Rock, a broad shell which jutted some sixty feet from the mainland over a cauldron of seething waters. At the end of the rock a wooden bridge, or staging, had been thrust forward some ten feet over the water, terminating in a small box, in which visitors could stand and view the foaming floods beneath, the staging being kept in position by a ponderous load of stones heaped upon its inner end.
Thousands of persons visited Table Rock, and, standing in the little box, listened to the thunder of the cataract, and saw the foam of the boiling flood. About noon one day in the month of June, 1850, Mr. George Wilkes, a well-known New York editor, accompanied a lady from the Clifton House to the Falls. As they left their carriage at Table Rock, and approached the platform, Mr. Wilkes pointed out to his companion a vast crack or fissure, traversing the entire base of the rock, and remarked that he had never noticed it before. The lady shuddered as she looked at it, and shrank back, declaring that she did not care about going upon the rock.
“Oh,” said he, “you might as well come on, now that you are here. I hardly think the rock will take a notion to fall simply because we are on it.”
They went out, and gazed upon the awful cataract and listened to its thundering roar, till they seemed filled with an indefinable dread.
“This is a terrible place,” said he. “Look under there and see on what a mere shell we stand. For years and years the teeth of the torrent in that angry stream have been gnawing out that hollow, and some day this plane must fall.”
The lady shuddered. They glanced again at the waters, when, looking at each other, each recognized in the other’s face an expression of mortal fear.
“I don’t like this place,” exclaimed Wilkes. “The whole base of the rock is probably disintegrated, and perhaps it is poised in a succession of notches, ready to fall out and topple down at any unusual perturbation. That fissure there seems to me to be unusually wide today. I think we had better leave, for I don’t fancy such a finis; and besides, my paper must be published next week.”
With these half-bantering words he seized his companion’s hand, and in absolute panic they fled as fast as their feet could carry them towards the shore, bursting into a laugh when they regained the land, and jumping into the carriage as if they had made a fortunate escape. They rode back towards the Clifton House, but within two minutes they heard a thundering report, like the roar of an earthquake; the ground trembled beneath their wheels, and turning about they found that Table Rock had fallen. Doubtless the unusual jar caused by their flying footsteps had disturbed its equilibrium and hurled it from its poise.
In a moment the road was filled with hurrying people, and they were told a hundred times that a lady and gentleman who were on Table Rock had gone down the Falls. They were safe, however, but their escape had been a most narrow one; and but for the nameless and unacknowledged fear which had rooted itself in their minds and revealed itself in their faces, they would undoubtedly both have been lost.
Table Rock had stood there for ages, and people had visited it again and again in safety, and yet everyone was aware that some time it might fall. The time had come, and only their sudden departure saved them from a terrible calamity.
So the world in which we live is verging onward toward a terrible doom; and yet people are fearless and indifferent, and secure. But the last day will come, and in the midst of carelessness, self-confidence, and security, shall burst upon mankind the thunder of the judgment hour. Men have been warned; but what avails warning? Noah warned the world in his day, but “they knew not till the flood came, and took them all away.” Warnings did not save those who dwelt in Sodom; and warnings will not save the ungodly who shall, at last, be taken in the snare, and overwhelmed in the ruin predicted. Let us see to it that we take heed to timely warnings, and “watch and pray” always, that we may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are coming on the earth.