told tales
till the moon got up and a party of campers in the woods gave us all
something to eat.

Next morning Tom drove us on, promising new wonders. He pulled up after
a few miles at a clump of brushwood where an army was drowning. I could
hear the sick gasps and thumps of the men going under, but when I broke
through the brushwood the hosts had fled, and there were only pools of
pink, black, and white lime, thick as turbid honey. They shot up a pat
of mud every minute or two, choking in the effort. It was an uncanny
sight. Do you wonder that in the old days the Indians were careful to
avoid the Yellowstone? Geysers are permissible, but mud is terrifying.
The old lady from Chicago took a piece of it, and in half an hour it
died into lime-dust and blew away between her fingers. All
_maya_,--illusion,--you see! Then we clinked over sulphur in crystals;
there was a waterfall of boiling water; and a road across a level park
hotly contested by the beavers. Every winter they build their dam and
flood the low-lying land; every summer that dam is torn up by the
Government, and for half a mile you must plough axle-deep in water, the
willows brushing into the buggy, and little waterways branching off
right and left. The road is the main stream--just like the Bolan line in
flood. If you turn up a byway, there is no more of you, and the beavers
work your buggy into next year's dam.

Then came soft, turfy forest that deadened the wheels, and two
troopers--on detachment duty--came noiselessly behind us. One was the
Wrap-up-his-Tail man, and we talked merrily while the half-broken horses
bucked about among the trees till we came to a mighty hill all strewn
with moss agates, and everybody had to get out and pant in that thin
air. But how intoxicating it was! The old lady from Chicago clucked like
an emancipated hen as she scuttled about the road cramming pieces of
rock into her reticule. She sent me fifty yards down the hill to pick up
a piece of broken bottle which she insisted was moss agate! "I've some
o' that at home an' they shine. You go get it, young feller."

As we climbed the long path, the road grew viler and viler till it
became without disguise the bed of a torrent; and just when things were
at their rockiest we emerged into a little sapphire lake--but never
sapphire was so blue--called Mary's Lake; and that between eight and
nine thousand feet above the sea. Then came grass downs, all on a
vehement slope, so that the