it and have a row
over this dark and gloomy river. Whenever our guide shouts we hear the
wildest kind of echoes, and everything seems solemn and unearthly. At
one time our boat stops for a moment, and the guide goes on shore, and
directly we hear the most awful crash imaginable. It sounds as if a
dozen gong-factories had blown up at once, and we nearly jump out of
the boat! But we soon see that it was nothing but the guide striking
on a piece of sheet-iron or tin. The echoes, one after another, from
this noise had produced the horrible crashing sounds we had heard.

After sailing along for about half an hour we land, and soon reach an
avenue which has its walls ornamented with beautiful flowers--all
formed on the rocky walls by the hand of Nature.

Now we visit the "Ball Room," which is large and handsome, with its
walls as white as snow. Leaving this, we take a difficult and exciting
journey to the "Rocky Mountains." We go down steep paths, which are
narrow, and up steep ones, which are wide; we jump over wide cracks
and step over great stones, and we are getting very tired of
scrambling about in the bowels of the earth; but the guide tells us
that if we will but cross the "mountains"--which we find to be nothing
more than great rocks, which have fallen from the roof above, but
which, however, are not very easy to get over--we shall rest in the
"Fairy Grotto." So on we push, and reach the delightful abode of the
fairies of the Mammoth Cave. That is, if there were any fairies in
this cave, they would live here.

And a splendid place they would have!

Great colonnades and magnificent arches, all ornamented with beautiful
stalactites of various forms, and glittering like cut-glass in the
light of our lanterns, and thousands of different ornaments of
sparkling stone, many of them appearing as if they were cut by the
hand of skilful artists, adorn this beautiful grotto. At one end there
is a group of stalactites, which looks to us exactly like a graceful
palm-tree cut out of alabaster. All over the vast hall we can hear the
pattering and tinkling of the water, which has been dripping, drop by
drop, for centuries, and making, as it carried with it little
particles of earth and rock, all these beautiful forms which we see.

We have now walked nearly five miles into the great cave, and there is
much which we have not seen. But we must go back to the upper earth.
We will have a tiresome trip of it, but it is seldom that we