the whole thing turned over under my hand as a tree
would do in a nightmare. From right and left came the trumpetings of
elephants at play. I stepped into a pool of old dried blood rimmed with
the nodding cornflowers; the blood changed to ink even as I trod; and
ink and blood were washed away in a spurt of boiling sulphurous water
spat out from the lee of a bank of flowers. This sounds mad, doesn't it?

A moonfaced 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, tastefully
scattered round 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 along together, now across half-rotten pine logs sunk
in swampy ground, anon over the ringing geyser formation, then knee-deep
through long grass.

"And why did you 'list?" said I.

The moonfaced 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 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 her
pretty little treachery; and the other man abandoned her and came West
to forget. Moonface was that man.

We rounded 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. In this place of despair lay most of the big 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 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 sank down out of sight till another
goblin arrived. Yet they called this place the Lioness and the Cubs. It
lies not very far from the Lion, which is a sullen, roaring beast, and
they say that when it is very active the other geysers presently follow
suit.