y would have found no coal. Coal is found in the new
red sandstone; but theirs was the old red sandstone, which is a very
fine old stone itself, but in which no coal was ever found, except what
might have been put there on purpose, or possibly some faint
indications. The hole they made, however, as my informant gravely
observed, was left sticking in the ground, and if he is right is to this
day a sort of appendix or tail to the well north-west corner of the
State House Square. So, I suppose, any one who chooses can go and poke
down there after it and satisfy himself about the accuracy of this
account. Such an inquirer ought to find satisfaction, for "truth lies in
the bottom of a well" says the proverb. Yet some ill natured skeptics
have construed this to mean that all will tell lies sometimes, for--as
they accent it, even "Truth _lies_, at the bottom of a well!"

Still a different sort of business humbug, again, was a wonderful story
which went the rounds about fifteen years ago, and which was cooked up
to help some one or other of the various enterprises for new routes by
Central America to California. This story started, I believe, in the
"New Orleans Courier." It was, that a French Doctor of Vera Paz in
Guatemala, while making a canal from his estate to the sea, discovered,
away up at the very furthest extremity of the Gulf of Honduras, a vast
ancient canal, two hundred and forty feet wide, seventy feet deep, and
walled in on both sides with gigantic masses of rough cut stone. The
Doctor at once gave up his own trifling modern excavation, and plunged
into an explanation of this vast ancient one, as zealously as if he were
probing after some uncertain bullet in a poor fellow's leg. The
monstrous canal carried him in a straight line up the country, to the
south-westward. Some twenty miles or so inland it plunged under a
_volcano!_

But see what a French doctor is made of!

Cutting down the great, old trees that obstructed the entrance, and
procuring a canoe with a crew of Indians, in he went. The canal became a
prodigious tunnel, of the same width and depth of water, and vaulted
three hundred and thirty five feet high in the living rock. Nothing is
said about the bowels of the volcano, so that we must conclude either
that such affairs are not planted so deep as is supposed, or that the
fire-pot of the concern was shoved one side or bridged over by the
canallers, or that the Frenchman had some remarkably good style o