und a
cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty
feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a
sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery
heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the
sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat,
and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and
volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there
was no help from below.

I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a
tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the
top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree
firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering
twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty--but I despair. The
half has not been told. It cannot be. Great and marvelous are all Thy
works, Lord God Almighty! In wisdom hast Thou made them all.

Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as
real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is
a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words
for thoughts which they signify." Using these faculties and not mere
eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness,
finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment,
but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been
made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are."

SEA SCULPTURE*

*Reprinted from _The Chautauquan_.

When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first
launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long
before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the
cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot
down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column
broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it,
but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.

So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge
with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at
Santa Cruz, California.

There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a
thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the
rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small
bo