"So crowd her hard with pitch and pine,
The other boat's ten miles behin':
Telegraph wires are mighty slow,
And our safety valves are tied below;
Now is the time for a bully trip,
So shake her up and let her rip."

I want to learn Seneca's song about the
"Steam-boat Race," being due in five days on
the Mississippi, in the very risky vessels the
minstrel Seneca describes so vividly. St. Ives
is disgusted, and lays by his science for a more
convenient season.

The Gothic Chapel, I think, comes in about
here, with its Domdaniel pillars and curious
fretwork, upon which Nature seems to have
expended her choicest and most playful hours.
As for the Devil's Arm-chair, it is only a large,
smoothed, brown, stalagmite pillar, with a throne
in the centre fit for Pluto himself, or the " Sky's
Lord Mayor." It is impossible, indeed, to see
these wonders without weaving around them
legends, heavenly, purgatorial, sepulchral, and
infernal.

Away go the three lamps to what I think
is, next to the subterranean river, the most
interesting spot in the whole cave, and that is
the StarChamber- a vast hall with light coloured
perpendicular walls and dark ceiling. This is
the theatre of a most strange ocular deception,
which Seneca, retreating far away from us, lamps
and all, behind a rocky screen, quickly prepares
to show us, to the murmuring tune of,

"Way down in Alabama, Alabama, Alabama,
Where the mocking-bird is singing on the tree."

Seneca was far from us, down in a sort of tank
hole in the floor, at the opposite end of the hall.
"What can a dark lantern make of two stone
walls and a high flat roof?" St. Ives wants to
know. We stare up, trying to fathom the darknes
with our eyes; suddenly Seneca's song dies
away with,

"Singing, singing on the tree,"

and goes out like a light. Then slowly over
the roof, from left to right, creeps and widens
a soft low depth of mist, which seems to
resemble (if it be not the thing itself) the
stifling luminous, yet dim blue, of a summer
evening, when the nightingales begin to sing,
and the stars are not yet visible, though they
still render that blue deeper and more spiritual
by their inner light. I look down for an instant
to relieve my eyes, then look up again, and lo!
the whole field of heaven has now blossomed into
stars; here, bright and single; there, close and
thick sown, as in the Milky Way.

It seems to me that I am a vagrant Arab,
looking up from between the dark precipices that
wall in Edom with flights of tombs. I could cut
off my hand, if that blue smother were not the
sky where Orion strides, Arcturus swims, and
where the Pole-star blazes!

Alas! out again goes the sky, out fade the
stars, and black and grotesque comes back
towards us Seneca's shadow; I see the shadow's
mouth opening as it shouts,

"Den I wish I was in Dixie's land,
Away down south in Dixie."

Then, again, we have the old " deceptio visus,"
the " idolon of the cave;" and again we
applaud, as the darkness, under the spell of
Seneca's magic-lantern, once more blooms into
stars, and the black roof-top melts into a
summer heaven.

"The great Indian chief, Black Hawk," says
Seneca, coming to a new show-place, waving his
lantern in a Polytechnic lecturer sort of way.

We look up at the ceiling, and see, shaped
by fantastic nature out of some half-alive black
lichen that writes cyphers on the roof, the
colossal semblance of a giant chief, Roman nose,
war plumes and all; and by his side, but less
easy to interpret, a huge squaw, bending under
the weight of her cradled papoose. Now, the
Indians did formerly repair to this cave, and
perhaps here they worshipped this shadow chief
as a regent and silent deputy of the Great
Spirit. A little further on, Seneca, to the tune
of "Yaller gals, be quiet," shows us other strange
hieroglyphics— such as an elephant, I think—
certainly a great ant-eater, with long black snout
—and a mammoth bear, if I remember right.

And now we draw near to the subterranean
river, the Styx of Kentucky, the river of the blind
fish. We reach it by long descending passages,
miry and dark. No cheery ripple nor laughing
murmur had told us from a distance of its
whereabout. We cross a bridge over a shaft
that no one had yet sounded, and find
ourselves on the bank of this dark Aeheron. I
fling in a fragment of a broken boat that lies
on the shore, and the echo sounds long,
mournful, and mysterious. The blind fish rise
not, no fin stirs in the quiet water. No living
and unenchanted thing surely had any place in
that still stream. The craft for it should
have been huge coffins, steered by skeletons and
paddled by pale things in damp wormy shrouds.

We turn here, and Seneca, chanting "The
other side of Jordan," lights some paper and
flings it down a long shaft called the Devil's
Telescope. The paper, shedding sparks, whirls
and whirls until it reaches the bottom, some
seventy feet, where it lies palely flaming and
glaring up at us, lighting the funereal oubliette.
There is no end to this Great Fiend Conjuror's
cavern. We next come to a low cave roof, hung
with what tradition calls the Witches' Hams,
and certainly, though there has been somewhat of
a glut of bacon in the market lately, we cannot
help allowing that the pendulous rocks look very
like Connecticut hams sewn up in bags ready
for market.

Seneca, a great strainer for iokes, says,

"Deblish tough eating, massa, and take 'em a
bery long time to boil, dare say!"

A little further on, Seneca brings us up at the
Side-saddle, the imperfection of which similitude
seems to distress him much, though it satisfies
our ready belief. But then a man who has gone
these nine miles, sometimes twice a day for ten
long years, is apt to get cold and critical.

Working out of what is called the Solitary
Chamber by way of the Humble Chute, we have
for seventeen feet (it seems a week) to grub our