pools that talk.

There was a maiden--a very trim maiden--who had just stepped out of one
of Mr. James's novels. She owned a delightful mother and an equally
delightful father, a heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of finance. The
parents thought that their daughter wanted change. She lived in New
Hampshire. Accordingly, she had dragged them up to Alaska, to the
Yosemite Valley, and was now returning leisurely _via_ the Yellowstone
just in time for the tail-end of the summer season at Saratoga. We had
met once or twice before in the Park, and I had been amazed and amused
at her critical commendation of the wonders that she saw. From that very
resolute little mouth I received a lecture on American literature, the
nature and inwardness of Washington society, the precise value of
Cable's works as compared with "Uncle Remus" Harris, and a few other
things that had nothing whatever to do with geysers, but were altogether
delightful. Now an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed,
lime-washed, sun-peeled, collarless wanderer come from and going to
goodness knows where, would, her mother inciting her and her father
brandishing his umbrella, have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer.
Not so those delightful people from New Hampshire. They were good enough
to treat me--it sounds almost incredible--as a human being, possibly
respectable, probably not in immediate need of financial assistance.
Papa talked pleasantly and to the point. The little maiden strove
valiantly with the accent of her birth and that of her reading, and
mamma smiled benignly in the background.

Balance this with a story of a young English idiot I met knocking about
inside his high collars, attended by a valet. He condescended to tell me
that "you can't be too careful who you talk to in these parts," and
stalked on, fearing, I suppose, every minute for his social chastity.
Now that man was a barbarian (I took occasion to tell him so), for he
comported himself after the manner of the head-hunters of Assam, who are
at perpetual feud one with another.

You will understand that these foolish tales are introduced in order to
cover the fact that this pen cannot describe the glories of the Upper
Geyser basin. The evening I spent under the lee of the Castle Geyser
sitting on a log with some troopers and watching a baronial keep forty
feet high spouting hot water. If the Castle went off first, they said
the Giantess would be quiet, and _vice versa_; and then they