ch worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper world; and so
journeying, bewildered with the novelty, came upon a really park-like
place where Tom suggested we should get out and play with the geysers on
foot.

Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime-beds, all the flowers
of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime. That was our
first glimpse of the geyser basins.

The buggy had pulled up close to a rough, broken, blistered cone of
spelter stuff between ten and twenty feet high. There was trouble in
that place--moaning, splashing, gurgling, and the clank of machinery.
A spurt of boiling water jumped into the air, and a wash of water
followed.

I removed swiftly. The old lady from Chicago shrieked. "What a wicked
waste!" said her husband.

I think they call it the Riverside Geyser. Its spout was torn and ragged
like the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there. It grumbled madly
for a moment or two, and then was still. I crept over the steaming
lime--it was the burning marl on which Satan lay--and looked fearfully
down its mouth. You should never look a gift geyser in the mouth.

I beheld a horrible, slippery, slimy funnel with water rising and
falling ten feet at a time. Then the water rose to lip level with a
rush, and an infernal bubbling troubled this Devil's Bethesda before
the sullen heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me
run.

Mark the nature of the human soul! I had begun with awe, not to say
terror, for this was my first experience of such things. I stepped back
from the banks of the Riverside Geyser, saying:--"Pooh! Is that all it
can do?"

Yet for aught I knew, the whole thing might have blown up at a minute's
notice, she, he, or it being an arrangement of uncertain temper.

We drifted on, up that miraculous valley. On either side of us were
hills from a thousand or fifteen hundred feet high, wooded from crest to
heel. As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in the
air, misshapen lumps of lime, mist-like preadamite monsters, still pools
of turquoise-blue stretches of blue corn-flowers, a river that coiled on
itself twenty times, pointed bowlders of strange colors, and ridges of
glaring, staring white.

A moon-faced trooper of German extraction--never was park so carefully
patrolled--came up to inform us that as yet we had not seen any of
the real geysers; that they were all a mile or so up the valley, and
tastefully scattered r