und about it is too soft to permit approach, and the heat
too great to tempt it. On a frosty morning, just before sunrise, it is a
fine sight. This, however, is only one of hundreds. It would be imagined
that if they all came from the same source, they would puff in some sort
of unison--that the beatings of the mighty heart below would be felt
simultaneously in every pulse; but the fact is quite the reverse. No
tune or concord is preserved by any two in the canon; one moves with the
quiet regularity of respiration, while the next is puffing with the
nervous anxiety of a little high-pressure tug boat. It affords endless
amusement to listen to their endless variety of complaint; some are
restless, some spiteful, and some angry, while others sound as merrily
as a teakettle, or beat a jolly 'rub-a-dub,' 'rataplan,' that makes a
man's soul merry to hear. In fact, there is a little retreat just out of
the canon, styled the Devil's Kitchen, where the pot and the saucepan,
the gridiron and the teakettle are visible to men gifted with
imaginations strong enough to grasp the unseen.

The great feature of the canon, which has given it the unmerited name of
'Geyser,' is the Witches' Caldron, a small cavity in the hillside,
seemingly running back into the hill at an angle of forty-five degrees,
filled with villanous black mud in unceasing commotion.

How different from the pellucid basin of the Great Geyser! Lord Dufferin
tells us that he '_brewed his coffee_ in the Geyser water.'

The mud boils like the angry lava-waves of a volcano; it is always of a
very high temperature, and occasionally runs over the rim of the basin,
but never rises violently into the air. It looks like black sulphur
(bitumen), and has a brimstone smell. Certainly it is a diabolical pit,
and worth coming far to see, but it shows none of the phenomena which
tempt travellers to Iceland.

It more closely resembles the salses or mud volcanoes of Central and
South America, and is a phenomenon very common on the sides of
volcanoes. As far back as the time of Pliny it was observed that 'in
Sicily eruptions of wet mud precede the glowing (lava) stream.'

Humboldt recognizes in the 'salses, or small mud volcanoes, a transition
from the changing phenomena presented by the eruptions of vapor and
thermal springs, to the more powerful and awful activity of the streams
of lava that flow from volcanic mountains.'

Although the recent discovery of the Devil's Canon in Ca