ping cornice, traced in horizontal panel-work, exceedingly
noble and regular; and not a single pier or pillar of any kind
contributes to support it. It needs no support. It is like the arched
and ponderous roof of the poet's mausoleum:

"By its own weight made stedfast and immoveable."

The floor is very irregularly broken, consisting of vast heaps of the
nitrous earth, and of the ruins of the hoppers or vats, composed of
heavy planking, in which the miners were accustomed to leach it. The
hall was, in fact, one of their chief factory rooms. Before their day,
it was a cemetery; and here they disinterred many a mouldering
skeleton, belonging it seems, to that gigantic eight or nine feet race
of men of past days, whose jaw-bones so many vivacious persons have
clapped over their own, like horse-collars, without laying by a single
one to convince the soul of scepticism.

Such is the vestibule of the Mammoth Cave,--a hall which hundreds of
visitors have passed through without being conscious of its existence.
The path, leading into the Grand Gallery, hugs the wall on the left
hand; and is, besides, in a hollow, flanked on the right hand by lofty
mounds of earth, which the visitor, if he looks at them at all, which
he will scarcely do, at so early a period after entering, will readily
suppose to be the opposite walls. Those who enter the Great Bat Room,
(Audubon Avenue,) into which flying visitors are seldom conducted,
will indeed have some faint suspicion, for a moment, that they are
passing through infinite space; but the walls of the Cave being so
dark as to reflect not one single ray of light from the dim torches,
and a greater number of them being necessary to disperse the gloom
than are usually employed, they will still remain in ignorance of the
grandeur around them.

Such is the vestibule of the Mammoth Cave, as described by the
ingenious author of "Calavar," "Peter Pilgrim," &c.

From the vestibule we entered Audubon Avenue, which is more than a
mile long, fifty or sixty feet wide and as many high. The roof or
ceiling exhibits, as you walk along, the appearance of floating
clouds--and such is observable in many other parts of the Cave. Near
the termination of this avenue, a natural well, twenty-five feet deep,
and containing the purest water, has been recently discovered; it is
surrounded by stalagmite columns, extending from the floor to the
roof, upon the incrustations of which, when lights are suspended,