tes, by experience, to fly from the hiss of these
subterraneous furnaces. Standing amid the roaring, thundering, stupendous
wonder of two hundred spouting water springs, we felt like crying out,
"Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God almighty!"

Let all the chemists and geologists of the world come and see the footstep
of God in crystals of alum and sulphur and salt. Here is the chemist's shop
of the continent. Enough black indelible ink rushes out of this well, with
terrific plash, to supply all the scribes of the world. There are infinite
fortunes for those who will delve for the borax, nitric and sulphuric acid,
soda, magnesia and other valuables. Enough sulphur here to purify the blood
of the race, or in gunpowder to kill it; enough salt to savor all the
vegetables of the world. Its acid water, which waits only for a little
sugar to make it delicious lemonade, may yet be found in all the drug
stores of the country. The water in one place roars like a steamboat
discharging its steam. Your boots curl with the heat as you stand on the
hot rocks, looking. Almost anywhere a thrust of your cane will evoke a gush
of steam. Our thermometer, plunged into one spring, answered one hundred
and seventy-five degrees of heat. Thrust in the "Witch's Caldron," it
asserted two hundred and fifteen degrees. "The Ink-stand" declared itself
two hundred degrees. An artificial whistle placed at the mouth of one of
these geysers may be heard miles away. You get a hot bath without paying
for it. The guide warns you off the crust in certain places, lest you at
the same moment be drowned and boiled. Here an egg cooks hard in three
minutes.

The whole scene is unique and incomparable. The Yosemite makes us think of
the Alps; San Francisco reminds us of Chicago; Foss, the stage driver,
hurling his passengers down the mountain at break-neck speed, suggests the
driver of an Alpine diligence; Hutchings' mountain horse, that stumbled and
fell flat upon us, suggested our mule-back experiences in Tete Noir Pass of
Switzerland; but the geysers remind us of nothing that we ever saw, or ever
expect to see. They have a voice, a bubble, a smoke, a death-rattle,
peculiar to themselves. No photographist can picture them, no words
describe them, no fancy sketch them.

You may visit them by either of two routes; but do not take the advice of
Foss, the celebrated stage driver. You ought to go by one route, and return
the other; yet Foss has made thousand