ound the hotel in which we would rest for the
night.

America is a free country, but the citizens look down on the soldier. I
had to entertain that trooper. The old lady from Chicago would have none
of him; so we loafed alone together, now across half-rotten pine logs
sunk in swampy ground, anon over the ringing geyser formation, then
pounding through river-sand or brushing knee-deep through long grass.

"And why did you enlist?" said I.

The moon-faced one's face began to work. I thought he would have a fit,
but he told me a story instead--such a nice tale of a naughty little
girl who wrote pretty love letters to two men at once. She was a simple
village wife, but a wicked "family novelette" countess couldn't have
accomplished her ends better. She drove one man nearly wild with the
pretty little treachery, and the other man abandoned her and came West
to forget the trickery.

Moon-face was that man.

We rounded and limped over a low spur of hill, and came out upon a field
of aching, snowy lime rolled in sheets, twisted into knots, riven with
rents, and diamonds, and stars, stretching for more than half a mile in
every direction.

On this place of despair lay most of the big, bad geysers who know when
there is trouble in Krakatoa, who tell the pines when there is a cyclone
on the Atlantic seaboard, and who are exhibited to visitors under pretty
and fanciful names.

The first mound that I encountered belonged to a goblin who was
splashing in his tub.

I heard him kick, pull a shower-bath on his shoulders, gasp, crack his
joints, and rub himself down with a towel; then he let the water out of
the bath, as a thoughtful man should, and it all sunk down out of sight
till another goblin arrived.

So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built up
exactly like a hive, at the Turban (which is not in the least like a
turban), and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and springs. Some
of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off spasmodically, and others
lay dead still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.

Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded
by the troopers to prevent the irreverent Americans from chipping the
cones to pieces, or, worse still, making the geyser sick? If you take a
small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it down a geyser's mouth, that
geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you, and for days
afterward will be of an irritated and inconstant