A REMARKABLE DISPLAY OF COLOR. 211 



sharply tipped and gently curving plates, rich brown in color, depend- 

 ing from a square canopy so that they reach the floor, save on one side, 

 where yon may enter as through. conveniently parted canvas. The Bri- 

 dal Chamber is curtained from curious gaze with their massive and care- 

 lessly graceful folds ; the walls of Pluto's Chasm are hung with them 

 as in a mighty wardrobe ; Diana's Bath is concealed under their protect- 

 ing shelter ; Titania's Veil is only a more delicate texture of the same ; 

 Cinderella Leaving the Ball becomes lost in their folds as she glides, 

 lace-white, to her disrobing ; and a Sleeping Beauty has wrapped these 

 abundant blankets about her motionless form ; while the Ballroom car- 

 ries you back to the days of the Bound Table, for the spacious walls are 

 hung as with tapestries. 



Do not disbelieve me when I speak of wealth of color. The range 

 is small, to be sure, but the variation of tint and shade is infinite and 

 never out of tune. A painter would perhaps express it intelligibly to 

 his brethren by saying it was all a harmony in brown. The first crys- 

 tals of these salts of lime are pure white and translucent. If you pick 

 up a fallen fragment of a young stalactite, you find it a white, delicate 

 tube, glassy without, spongy within, alabaster-like, and almost transpa- 

 rent. Where water is continuously flowing, and crystallization at pres- 

 ent is going on with some rapidity, as at the various " frozen fountains" 

 and " cascades " — which look precisely like the gleaming cataracts of 

 sunlit ice that are to be seen on high mountains, or at Niagara in win- 

 ter — the surface is crystalline, perfectly white, like fresh marble, only 

 more radiant and ethereal, and sparkling with a soft, snowy light. Such 

 is the lofty and richly chased Empress Column, the Geyser, the odd lit- 

 tle Comet, the Spectre that gleams fitfully from the stygian gloom of 

 a seemingly boundless abyss, a thousand alabaster pinnacles and pend- 

 ants scattered here and there, and much silvery fretwork on wall and 

 monument. But when the steady growth ceases, and fresh crystals no 

 longer supersede with maiden purity the debutantes of yesterday, then 

 the carbonic moisture of the air eats away the glistening particles of 

 lime, and leaves behind a discolored residuum of clay-dust and iron ox- 

 ides. If this has gone on very long, the object attached becomes almost 

 completely decomposed ; you may push your penknife to its hilt into 

 the apparently adamantine substance of the Fallen Column. Thus it 

 happens that, from the niveous purity or pearly surface of the new work, 

 there runs a gentle gradation through every stage of yellowish and whit- 

 ish brown to the dun of the long abandoned and dirty stalagmite, the 

 leaden gray of the native limestone, or the inky shadow that lurks be- 



