to deceive the very elect. No such pretender has appeared since
Cagliostro; and nobody ever succeeded so well in misleading public
opinion, and embroiling so many persons of consideration, both in this
country and in Europe, not excepting the Chevalier d'Eon, and the
Princess Cariboo. Many other strange things might be related of Bratish,
as, for example, his great speech in the Hungarian Diet, reported in the
_Allgemeine Zeitung_,--the most impudent forgery of our day. But this
paper is already longer than I intended; and I have only to add, that I
have reason to believe now that he was indeed a native of Trieste, and
that Colonel Stille and Mr. McIlvaine were right in saying what they did
of him _generally_, though wrong in many of the particulars upon which
they chiefly relied.

A TOUR IN THE DARK.

One February evening, more than a year ago, after a drive of fourteen
miles over a lonely Kentucky road, I drew rein in front of a huge,
rambling wooden building, standing solitary in the midst of the forest.

There was no village in sight to account for the presence of so large a
structure, no adjacent farms, and, except a little patch in front of the
house, no fields,--nothing but the solemn woods which nearly shut it in
on every side.

I did not ask if this was the Mammoth Cave Hotel. I knew it without
asking.

Here I was, then, at last,--about to see what I had desired to see ever
since I was a boy!

But delay frequently comes with the certainty of accomplishing any
long-cherished desire; and though I had driven with a hasty whip from
the railway station fourteen miles away, and though the hotel proprietor
offered to procure me a guide that evening, my haste to see the cave was
unaccountably over. I ordered a fire in my room, and concluded to wait
until morning.

It was too early in the season for the usual summer visitors, and I
found myself the sole guest in this big, lonesome caravansary, that
looked as though a dozen old-fashioned Dutch farm-houses had been placed
in the midst of a wood-lot, and then connected by the roofs, the whole
forming one straggling, weather-stained, labyrinthine building, full of
little nests of rooms, high-pitched gables, cumbrous outside
chimney-stacks, cavernous fireplaces, and low, wide corridors open at
either end, where were uncertain shadows, and draughts of damp air that
whispered and moaned all night long.

In the evening, as I sat before the blazing pile of lo