upon a rock in a most picturesque attitude. The guide took a lower seat,
and his dirty tin cup, swung across his breast, looked like an ornament
as the light struck it; his swarthy face was bright, and I wondered what
our friends at home would give for a picture.

"One of these elliptical halls has its ceiling immensely far off, and of
the deepest black, until our feeble little lights strike upon
innumerable points, when it shines forth like a dark starlight night.
The stars are faint, but they look so exceedingly like the heavens that
one easily forgets that it is not reality.

"The guide asked us to be seated, while he went behind down a descent
with the lights, to show us the creeping over of the shadows of the
rocks, as if a dark cloud passed over the starlit vault. The black cloud
crept on and on as the guide descended, until a fear came over us, and
we cried out together to him to come back, not to leave us in total
darkness. He begged that he might go still lower and show us entire
darkness, but we would not permit it.

"Guin's Dome. What the name means I can't say. The guide tells you to
pause in your scrambling over loose stones and muddy soil,--which you
are always willing to do,--and to put your head through a circular
aperture, and to look up while he lights the Bengal light; you obey, and
look up upon columns of fluted, snowy whiteness; he tells you to look
down, and you follow the same pillars down--up to heights which the
light cannot climb, down to depths on which it cannot fall.

"You shudder as you look up, and you shudder as you look down. Indeed,
the march of the cave is a series of shudders. Geologists may enjoy it,
a large party may be merry in it; but if the 'underground railroad' of