ith a pole twenty-five feet long, but we found no bottom.

Everything around us--air, earth, water--is impregnated with sulphur. We
feel it in every drop of water we drink, and in every breath of air we
inhale. Our silver watches have turned to the color of poor brass,
tarnished.

General Washburn and I again visited the mud vulcano to-day. I
especially desired to see it again for the one especial purpose, among
others of a general nature, of assuring myself that the notes made in my
diary a few days ago are not exaggerated. No! they are not! The
sensations inspired in me to-day, on again witnessing its convulsions,
and the dense clouds of vapor expelled in rapid succession from its
crater, amid the jarring of the earth, and the ominous intonations from
beneath, were those of mingled dread and wonder. At war with all former
experience it was so novel, so unnaturally natural, that I feel while
now writing and thinking of it, as if my own senses might have deceived
me with a mere figment of the imagination. But it is not so. The wonder,
than which this continent, teeming with nature's grandest exhibitions,
contains nothing more marvelous, still stands amid the solitary
fastnesses of the Yellowstone, to excite the astonishment of the
thousands who in coming years shall visit that remarkable locality.[J]

Returning to the camp we had left in the morning, we found the train had
crossed the river, and we forded at the same place, visiting, however,
on our way another large cauldron of boiling mud lying nearly opposite
our camp. Soon after fording the river we discovered some evidence that
trappers had long ago visited this region. Here we found that the earth
had been thrown up two feet high, presenting an angle to the river,
quite ingeniously concealed by willows, and forming a sort of rifle-pit,
from which a hunter without disclosing his hiding place could bring down
swans, geese, ducks, pelicans, and even the furred animals that made
their homes along the river bank.

We followed the trail of the advance party along the bank of the river,
and most of the way through a dense forest of pine timber and over a
broad swampy lowland, when we came into their camp on the Yellowstone
lake two miles from where it empties into the river, and about ten miles
from our morning camp. We passed Brimstone basin on our left, and saw
jets of steam rising from the hills back of it. From all appearances the
Yellowstone can be forded at almo