exclusively for
fungi of the old families. Here we rot piecemeal and furnish gas to
the nine-thousandth generation after us. By our decay the springs are
fed with bubbles. Here is the world as it fell in the floral period,
and our boughs are budding anew in the Eldorado of the waters above
us."

"Phosphates! phew!" shouted the great birds of this land of Lethe, as
Mr. Waples' stalagmite broke off and dropped him and set him astride
of an ancient pterodactyl bird that flew off with its burden to an
immense height, and swinging him there by the seat of his breeches, as
if he were to be the pendulum of a fundamental and firmamental clock,
the griffin-bird finally let go. Mr. Waples was propelled at least six
miles out of gravity, and tossed into a most deep and silent lake.
Nothing affected its loveliness but an oppressive shadow that came
from above, and seemed to sink every floating object in the scarcely
buoyant waves. No shores were visible, but distant mountains on one
side; nothing lived in the waters but meteoric lights and objects that
ran as if on errands for the spirit above. Broad, submissive,
unevaporating, but sinking down; the great inland lonely pool was
everywhere the creature of an invisible footprint. Mr. Waples knew the
power it obeyed to be that prostrate, cloud-like, overbrooding
presence, far above, with outlines like a mountain range. The silent
sea was the water-trough of Apalachia, the western dyke of the deluge
of Noah. The oppressive spirit, stretching overhead, was Bellydown, or
the thing that brooded over the waters of chaos, known to
schoolmasters as Atmospheric Pressure.

Mr. Waples saw it all now. The spirit overhead, with equal and
eternal pressure, forced down this meteoric water through the slopes
of stone, until it reascended toward the clouds of its origin and was
lost in the forest of the fossils, where every decaying fibre made
bubbles to drive it forward, and hold in solution the mineral
substances it was to receive in the porous magnesian barrier between
it and freedom. Soaking through this, the water escaped by the break
in the strata at the arch of the Fault Finder.

But who had ever passed back against the current of the earth's
barometry, from the spa to the reservoir, like Andrew Waples, of
Horntown, Eastern Shore of Virginia?

He felt a mighty vanity overwhelm him to get recognition of some kind
from Bellydown, who disdained even thunder for a language.

"Thou sprawlin