n for the ropes around our waist, we should
have slipped and fallen we knew not whither. We almost fancied that, in
the moving currents of air, we heard the wailings of the lost in the
great sulphurous lake below. The stones we threw in were lost to sound
unless they hit upon a projecting rock, and fell from shelf to shelf.
The deep darkness was fearful to contemplate. The abyss looked as
though it might be the mouth of the bottomless pit. What must have been
the effect when each one of these 'breathing holes' was vomiting liquid
fire and sulphur into the basin in which we stood? How immeasurable
must be that lake whose overflowings fill such cavities as this! It is
when standing in such a place that we get the full force of the figures
used by the Scriptures in illustrating the condition of the souls that
have perished forever.

"Let us turn from great to smaller things--to witness the labors of the
men who work, and eat, and often sleep in the volcano. Some are digging
sulphur and placing it in baskets, while others are waiting to carry it
upon their heads up the side of the crater. Others, again, out of our
sight far up the mountain, are working at the oven, when the weather is
clear, and there is no cloud between them and the sun, as it is only in
the finest weather that men can work upon the top, or carry burdens to
the hacienda. When the weather is fine, all the works are in full
operation, and good profits are realized by furnishing brimstone for
the manufacture of sulphuric acid.

"We are at the top once more; and now that our eyesight, which we lost
in climbing the mountain, is restored to us, we will take a view of the
lower world. Looking toward the west, every object glows in the
brightness of the rising sun, except where the mountain casts its vast
shadow even across the valley of Toluca. How strangely diminished now
are all familiar objects that are visible! The pureness of the medium
through which things are seen presents distant objects with great
distinctness, but it will not present them in their natural size, for
it can not change the angle of vision. The villages upon the table-land
were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women,
surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is,
by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist
placed himself where we now stood, he would have more than realized the
picture which his fancy painted. He