erable gloom, and so are dead women above the ground tied to
living men, and men without a human hope of health mated to joyous
beauty and animation."

It seemed at this point that Mr. Waples shrank away down to the
ground, and the Great Dipper loomed up high as the mountain of High
Rock. His drinking glasses were as large as Mr. Waples' body; he was a
mighty giant, clad in colors like those of the overflowing mountain.

"Old chap," cried Mr. Waples, "methinks your clothing up there is of
much age and tarnish. Tell me its material?"

A voice came down the long ravines of the mountain like rolling
thunder. "It's calcareous tufa I'm a-wearing, wove on me by exudation
and accretion in the past two thousand years."

At this point the head of the Great Dipper was quite invisible in the
clouds, but the tray of glasses he carried, which were now big as
barrels or full-sized casks, was set down on Mr. Waples' toe. As he
sought to get out of the way a torrent of water washed him up and
away, and he was spilled into one of the glasses; and then, as it
appeared, he was raised an inconceivable distance in the air and
plunged down like a bursted balloon from the sky to the sea, and he
found himself immersed in mineral water and rapidly descending,
against the current, toward the centre of the earth!

Before Mr. Waples could get his breath he was landed in a bar or shoal
of mineral salt, which came nearly to the surface of the torrent in
which he found himself, and the current of this torrent was ascending
toward the surface, as full of mineral substances as a freshet is full
of saw-logs. Explosions of gas, loud and rapid as the guns in a naval
battle, took place on every side. The walls of the inclosure made a
large and almost regular cave or tunnel of blue marl, and in the
contrary way from the course of the stream. Mr. Waples sank along the
sides of the cave in the swash or backflow, until he arrived at a
grand archway of limestone, riven from a mass of slate. A voice from
the roof of the archway, whispering like a sigh of pain, articulated
shrilly,

"Who goes back?"

Waples discerned, in the joint or junction of the arch a huge deformed
object, whose hands were caught between the masses of stone, and he
still desperately pulled to divide them, so that the torrent could
escape through. The eyes of this object rolled in pain, but he gave no
sign of relinquishing his hold, and again the painful whisper skipped
through the a