knots, riven with rents, and diamonds, and stars, stretching for
more than half a mile in every direction.

On this place of despair lay most of the big, bad geysers who
know when there is trouble in Krakatoa, who tell the pines when

there is a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard, and who are
exhibited to visitors under pretty and fanciful names.

The first mound that I encountered belonged to a goblin who was
splashing in his tub.

I heard him kick, pull a shower-bath on his shoulders, gasp,
crack his joints, and rub himself down with a towel; then he let

the water out of the bath, as a thoughtful man should, and it all
sunk down out of sight till another goblin arrived.

So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive, whose mouth is built
up exactly like a hive, at the Turban (which is not in the least

like a turban), and at many, many other geysers, hot holes, and
springs. Some of them rumbled, some hissed, some went off

spasmodically, and others lay dead still in sheets of sapphire
and beryl.

Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be
guarded by the troopers to prevent the irreverent Americans from

chipping the cones to pieces, or, worse still, making the geyser
sick? If you take a small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it

down a geyser's mouth, that geyser will presently be forced to
lay all before you, and for days afterward will be of an

irritated and inconstant stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I

wish that I had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely
little beast far away in the woods. It sounds so probable and so

human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the

Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth; she looks like a
pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no

ornamentation about her. At irregular intervals she speaks and
sends up a volume of water over two hundred feet high to begin

with, then she is angry for a day and a half--sometimes for two
days.

Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night, not many
people have seen the Giantess at her finest; but the clamor of

her unrest, men say, shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like
thunder among the hills.

The congregation returned to the hotel to put down their
impressions in diaries and note-books, which they wrote up

ostentatiously in the verandas. It was a sweltering hot day,
albeit we stood some-what higher than the level of Simla, and I

left that raw pine creaking caravansary for the cool shade of a
clump of pines between whose trunks glimmered tents.

A batch of United States troopers came down the road and flung
themselves across the country into their rough lines. The

Melican cavalryman can ride, though he keeps his accoutrements
pig-fashion and his horse cow-fashion.

I was free of that camp in five minutes--free to play with the
heavy, lumpy carbines, have the saddles stripped, and punch the

horses knowingly in the ribs. One of the men had been in the
fight with "Wrap-up-his-Tail," and he told me how that great

chief, his horse's tail tied up in red calico, swaggered in front
of the United States cavalry, challenging all to single combat.

But he was slain, and a few of his tribe with him.
"There's no use in an Indian, anyway," concluded my friend.

A couple of cow-boys--real cow-boys--jingled through the camp
amid a shower of mild chaff. They were on their way to Cook

City, I fancy, and I know that they never washed. But they were
picturesque ruffians exceedingly, with long spurs, hooded

stirrups, slouch hats, fur weather-cloth over their knees, and
pistol-butts just easy to hand.

"The cow-boy's goin' under before long," said my friend. "Soon
as the country's settled up he'll have to go. But he's mighty

useful now. What would we do without the cow-boy?"
"As how?" said I, and the camp laughed.

"He has the money. We have the skill. He comes in winter to
play poker at the military posts. We play poker--a few. When

he's lost his money we make him drunk and let him go. Sometimes
we get the wrong man."

And he told me a tale of an innocent cow-boy who turned up,
cleaned out, at an army post, and played poker for thirty-six

hours. But it was the post that was cleaned out when that
long-haired Caucasian removed himself, heavy with everybody's pay

and declining the proffered liquor.
"Noaw," said the historian, "I don't play with no cow-boy unless

he's a little bit drunk first."
Ere I departed I gathered from more than one man the significant

fact that up to one hundred yards he felt absolutely secure
behind his revolver.

"In England, I understand," quoth the limber youth from the
South,--"in England a man isn't allowed to play with no

fire-arms. He's got to be taught all that when he enlists. I
didn't want much teaching how to shoot straight 'fore I served

Uncle Sam. And that's just where it is. But you was talking
about your Horse Guards now?"

I explained briefly some peculiarities of equipment connected
with our crackest crack cavalry. I grieve to say the camp roared.

"Take 'em over swampy ground. Let 'em run around a bit an' work
the starch out of 'em, an' then, Almighty, if we wouldn't plug

'em at ease I'd eat their horses."
There was a maiden--a very little maiden--who had just stepped

out of one of James's novels. She owned a delightful mother and
an equallydelightful father--a heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of

finance. The parents thought that their daughter wanted change.
She lived in New Hampshire. Accordingly, she had dragged them up

to Alaska and to the Yosemite Valley, and was now returning
leisurely, via the Yellowstone, just in time for the tail-end of

the summer season at Saratoga.
We had met once or twice before in the park, and I had been

amazed and amused at her criticalcommendation of the wonders
that she saw. From that very resolute little mouth I received a

lecture on American literature, the nature and inwardness of
Washington society, the precise value of Cable's works as

compared with Uncle Remus Harris, and a few other things that had
nothing whatever to do with geysers, but were altogether

pleasant.
Now, an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed,

lime-washed, sun-peeled, collarless wanderer come from and going
to goodness knows where, would, her mother inciting her and her

father brandishing an umbrella, have regarded him as a dissolute
adventurer--a person to be disregarded.

Not so those delightful people from New Hampshire. They were
good enough to treat him--it sounds almost incredible--as a human

being, possibly respectable, probably not in immediate need of
financial assistance.

Papa talked pleasantly and to the point.
The little maidenstrovevaliantly with the accent of her birth

and that of her rearing, and mamma smiled benignly in the
background.

Balance this with a story of a young English idiot I met mooning
about inside his high collar, attended by a valet. He

condescended to tell me that "you can't be too careful who you
talk to in these parts." And stalked on, fearing, I suppose,

every minute for his social chastity.