noon on Monday
Good-bye ! '' and away he whirled , leaving Leslie to look after him until out of sight , and to say to himself as he walked up the esplanade over the rapids : `` I thought that _ I _ was an oddity and a contradiction , but that fellow can _ discount _ me ! I do n't know half as much about him now , as I did the first moment I saw him ! '' Tom Leslie was not left to loneliness and his own resources very long at the Cataract , for Walter Lane Harding reached Niagara at noon on Monday , having left New York on Sunday evening . Though even had Leslie been left to his `` own resources , '' these resources were somewhat more numerous than usual , and he was never much in the habit of being so bored by Time as to be obliged to lay plots against its life . In the first place -- no , that should be the _ second _ place -- he had his duties as a newspaper-correspondent at a leading and fashionable resort , which entailed a letter every day , but which did not entail , let us say , the chronicling of the details of hops and evening assemblies , after a manner somewhat scandalously prevalent , with descriptions of the `` charming dress worn by Miss A -- , '' the `` elegance and grace of the accomplished Miss B -- , '' and all the other disgusting and indecent Jenkinsism of the initials , together with fulsome laudations of the table and even the laundry of the hotel , leading to the impression that the correspondent is upon free board and even free _ washing _ ! Our cosmopolitan had outlived that phase of callow journalism , long before ; and the managing-editor would have been a bold one who should now have proposed to him to re-enter that most contemptible of all literary harness .