out by the urgency of our wants. On the whole,
he leads us to believe that we are the obliged
persons—which I suppose we are. The blacks, too,
are not the least in a hurry. I seem to myself
not at a place where I pay for my accommodation,
but rather a visitor at a cold-blooded
friend's, whose general invitation I have too
sanguinely and literally interpreted.

We sign our names in the reception book, and
receive in return the keys of our bedrooms,
which, open on a huge boarded balconied
gallery, overlooking a garden. We come down and
dine, surrounded by blacks; we read, we smoke,
we sing, and, going to bed, we dream of the cave.

We awake to find breakfast and the guide
ready. The season is over, or the hotel would
be crowded. The landlord is as calm as ever,
and plays gracefully with his toothpick as he
hands us over to Seneca: a stout frank-looking
young negro, who precedes us, carrying an
armful of rude unlighted tin lamps; a flask of
Kentucky rye whisky; and plenty of lucifers.

We scramble over some paddocks lumbered
with rubbish— broken bottles, oyster-shells, and
so forth; and, passing through a scrap of
plantation all in a golden glow now, as of
lamp-light with autumnal decay find ourselves
suddenly following Seneca down a sort of sand-pit,
opposite a lonely plank-house, some broken
rusty machinery, and the planks of a worn-out
punt.

I look away from the golden glow of autumn,
"like Herod rotting in his pomp," and see a
huge cave far down in the dingle, black as
Erebus and old Night. There is a hot white
mist rising in the underwood, through which the
cave seems to break so suddenly, that for the
moment I fancy myself the little vagrant Aladdin,
and that my bad uncle has been burning
Arabian frankincense.

What with the little green strings of wild
vines that fall over its mouth and embroider
the darkness, and what with the little bats that
buzz in and out, like so many demoniac butterflies,
I begin to expect to see Zamiel in red,
stride glimmering out of the darkness, followed
by Death in Life, Queen Sin, Apollyon and suite,
and Mammon with gold dripping from him.

But Seneca thinks nothing of a darkness he
has experienced so often, and he coolly sings as
he trims the lamps:

"A possum on a simmon-tree,
With one eye winked right down at me,
Fast by his tail the crittur swung,
And this old chorus sweetly sung:
' Get along hum, my yaller gals,
For the moon on the grass am shining.'

Siree! how wet it is, misters, and dat's de
trufe." And he points, grinning (a negro laughs
at everything), at the complete veil of silver that
the rain-drops from the bank above shed across
the mouth of the cave. " But we shall be dry
enough in these diggins," says Seneca, leading on.

A scramble down the bank and we are under
the archway of the cave- a place to dream of-
a place for Lazarus to have emerged from into
sunshine, his face first paling out through the
darkness—a grave for Rembrandt to study in- a
den for Michael Angelo's giants- a place whence
the Deluge might have risen over the earth.

While my friend St. Ives, fellow of St.
Barabbas College, Oxford, is asking Seneca
abstruse questions about the remains of the
mastodon and the Big Bone Licks in Boone's
county, Seneca lights the lamps and sings:

"Oh, boys! come along and shuck de corn;
Oh, boys! come along to the rattle of de horn,
"We'll shuck and sing till de coming of de morn,
And den we'll ford de river.
O Bob Ridley, O! O! O!
How could you fool de possum so?"

The lamps are mere round tin trays, with wick
cases in the middle, and are hung by wires to a
tin cover and ring, through which the fingers
pass. Flannel jackets and miners' boots we
despise, for the cave is dry and reasonably clean,
and the temperature (equable all the year at
about 59 deg. Fahrenheit) pleasanter and cooler
than the steaming damp heat of the woods we
have just left. There is no danger of our lamps
going out, and if they do, we shall all keep
together, and Seneca carries matches enough, for
Guy Fawkes.

We are just leaving the light for the darkness,
when St. Ives as one of those men who
knows everything puts down his lamp, and
requests to know, having spent half the night
over Appleton's guide-books and Maccaw's
America, whether Seneca will first lead us to the
Church, the Gothic Avenue, Louisa's Bower,
the Dead Sea, the Giant's Coffin, the Elephant's
Head, or the Fairy's Orchard?

Seneca, shrugging his shoulders at me, and
looking upon St. Ives as a " riglar driver,"
pretends not to hear, and muttering something
about the "lectrum telumgraff," strides on, singing
in a blithe voice,

"Oh! the master is proud of the old broad horn,
For it brings him plenty of tin.
Oh! the crew they are darkies, the cargo is corn,
And the money comes tumbling in.
Down the river, down the river,
Down the Ohio!"

The air becomes warmer and warmer as we
begin our tour of the two hundred and twenty-six
avenues, the forty-seven domes, the eight
cataracts, and the twenty-three pits. Surely
when Nature first arranged her huge Pandora
casket- the earth- she packed this nine miles
badly and loosely. Elsewhere she crammed in
her gold and jewels, her rich fat earth, so
magical, and of such inexhaustible virtue; but
here she forgot something that should have filled
up, and being rather behind time, sent off the
great present to Adam incomplete.

St. Ives, being always ashamed of appearing
pleased, calls the cave " a humbug" before he
has seen it, and discourses to me, learnedly but
drearily, of the glacier boulders found in the
prairies, of the Tar and Sulphur Springs, and of
the Sink Holes in Kentucky, that, near
Mumfordville, rise and flow in regular intermittent
tides. But here Seneca, turning in a patronising
way, and singing,