"Nebraska's gwine to be a state,
Few days, few days;
Cuba, too, will come in late-
I'm gwine home,"

draws our attention to the fact that after threading
a hall and several passages we have reached
a broad uneven space, called the Sick-room.

In this Sick-room, at one gloomy corner far
from the light of day, there are the ruins of
a row of stone cabins, where eight or ten
consumptive persons, some of them wealthy, came
and lived for several months, some years ago.
This strange episode in the history of quackdom
interests me much, so we three (St. Ives
is muttering something about "igneous origin,"
and rubbing two stones together) sit down
inside one of the tenantless houses, and putting
our lanterns inside the hollow square we have
formed, make Seneca tell us all about it:

Some years ago, a Kentucky doctor, during
a visit to this wonderful cave, was struck by
its equable temperature, and, believing that
physical symptoms were often rendered chronic
by the terrible fluctuations of heat and cold,
dryness and moisture, that distinguish the American
climate, formed an empirical opinion that a winter
spent in the cave might retard, if not heal,
consumption. Dying men, who linger coughing at
death's door, are ready to do anything. Old age
is not very common in America, where, after a hot
and feverish burst of life, men wear out soon, and
die young. A straw seems a beam to a drowning
man; purses were pulled out; and a stream of
dollars set in towards the cave—which, by-the-by,
belonged to the doctor; but this is, of course,
an immaterial point. Building materials were
soon dragged down into the darkness; this great
sepulchre, the " no thoroughfare" entrance to
Hades, rang with sounds of axes and hammers.
Soon, a row of stone huts— very small, but with
room enough for a stool and bed, and table and
chest, in each—was raised. Down into these, on
litters, on horseback, or crawling on foot, came
thin hectic creatures; down, down into the
darkness. The landlord-doctor had cast out his
nets, and had drawn in a goodly draught.

Months passed, and the patients grew no
better; one died in this dreary abode. Daily,
at a certain hour, a negro servant visited them
wth food, like a gaoler. How glad they
must have been to have heard his cheery voice
come chanting songs down the glimmering
entrance, where the oats whine faintly when the
light disturbs them in their winter sleep!

Imagine the long hours round those lurid
stones in that great sarcophagus, the nightmare
dreams, the spectral-creeping sense of alarm
and isolation, the slowly-fading hopes as the
chances of recovery began to recede into the
darkness; and death there!

But Seneca, sending daylight into our minds
by singing " Happy Land of Canaan," now
hurries us on. We pass through many
avenues and passages, all of the same hard
brown solid and seamless rock, observing its
water-worn surface. Except for a certain sort
of opaque jewel character caused by its dull
smoothness, never was stone less interesting in
colour or surface; sandstone would have shown
us every shade of brown and orange; granite,
every hue of clouded purple; but. this stone
is dull, uniform, and only sublime from its
mechanical grandeur of almost endless
repetition.

When I call the cave monotonous, however, I
speak only of its wall surface, rounded dull by
water action, for the roofage and floorage
present to us endless diversities. Now, we
ascend twenty feet— now, we descend—now, we
clamber up the surface of a low crag, by means
of a rude wooden ladder, or cross a chasm by a
frail plank bridge: while, at irregular intervals,
there is always some fresh apartment on some
isolated rock of strange shape, to draw a yell
and a song from Seneca, and a shrug and
adjustment of his spectacles from St. Ives, who is
just now great upon " the origin of species."
As it is almost impossible without a map to
remember the exact order of the wonders in the
Mammoth Cave, I will not pretend to do so. It
might be before or after— it scarcely matters
which—that we have explored " The Audubon
Avenue," a pandemonium hall, unfurnished, a
mile in length, sixty feet high, and as many
broad; the Grand Gallery, a huge tunnel
some miles long; the Gothic Avenue, two
miles long, forty feet wide, and fifteen feet
high; Louisa's Bower, Vulcan's Furnace, the
Two Register Rooms, and some other halls,
chambers, and passages of this subterranean
palace of the dead Pan; when Seneca, singing

"With a doodum, doodum, da!"

deigns to stop, puts down his lantern by the
wide wall of a passage, and bids us listen. We
listen, and there comes to us the musical drip,
drip, as of a Roman water-clock, regular as a
healthy man's pulse, equal and steady in sound
as the tick of a chronometer. Its voice comes
from some of the unseen springs that honey comb
this great cave of the Amercian Naiads, like the
lisping of a baby oracle. It is awful in that
tomb to hear that angel whisper, like the voice
of the fairy of the place.

A passage or two further, and Seneca, hushing
a hum of

"Dandy Jim from Caroline''

bids us stop and look across the gloom at " the
Giant's Coffin." I look, and see nothing (St.
Ives says " Imposition—go on," &c.), nothing
but a darkness, as over some Alpine dell, with
here and there crags and peaks peering through,
but lonely and tenantless. I look again, and see,
supported on I know not what slender piles or
buttresses, a huge stone sarcophagus, some
thirty feet long, like that of a pre-Adamite king,
the jewelled inscription gone, the hieroglyphics
long since cancelled by Tune's fingers.

"More like a stone snuff-box," grumbles St.
Ives; " a mere slab of limestone. Move on,
guide; we're losing time here. The crystallisations
of the basalt in Antrim are far more curious,
and Wedgebone, writing on the Amorphous
Theory, says—— "