e
regarded as a special pleasure, but cave hunters learn to accept
whatever is and be thankful for the general average. At the last moment,
however, a team was driven up and permission given us to make use of it.
It proved to be the private conveyance of the hotel proprietor, and the
young boy who accompanied us, his son.

Our train was on time, and the ride through the Hills to their southern
limit, in the falling snow, was wonderfully beautiful; but the storm
continued for many days and was one of the most severe on record.

Those persons who have been so unfortunate as to permit themselves to
accept a ready made opinion of dangers and roughness to be met with in
the more newly settled regions, might find a tour of the Hills doubly
interesting by making a supplementary study of "The Living Age," which
cannot be so correctly viewed from a distance as is sometimes supposed,
since the specimens exhibited are not always a true average of the
strata they are supposed to represent.

CHAPTER XVI.

CONCLUSION.

After a visit to the marvelous caverns of the Black Hills, much may be
added to the pleasure already enjoyed, through the explanatory activity
of the Yellowstone National Park, where even the wonderful combinations
of beauty and grandeur are by no means the full measure of attraction
and charm. Here is found evidence to verify theories concerning the
caves, and those theories in turn contribute in no small degree to a
satisfactory understanding of the mysteries of geyser action. For
scientific study the two regions should be taken together, since the
natural conditions are practically the same, and the chief difference
lies in the stages of development; the present of the Park explaining
the recent past of the Hills, while the present of the Hills foretells
the future of the Park. It seems that Nature, with a full appreciation
of the limits and restrictions binding our powers to penetrate certain
secrets of an intermittent force, has in this great western country
carefully prepared what might quite properly be termed a progressive
course of study, wherein each locality makes plain a special point that
somewhere else appears obscure.

As has been said in the preceding chapters, the two great caves in the
Black Hills of South Dakota cannot be accounted for by the same methods
as are recognized as being responsible for the slow excavation of the
best known caves of the United States. Although there is every