the trees, bathing in the noisy streams, tramping off alone through beguiling bypaths of desert and cañon. Here the wilderness is so commanding and omnipotent that the dim, winding human trail among the rocks and sand seemed almost of yesterday's making, giving us the feeling of the intrepid discoverer. Think of coming suddenly to an opening among the trees and, all unexpectedly, beholding a fine, brawling stream tumbling down a mountain-side, or a snow-clad mountainpeak with the sun upon it, or an elk or a deer starting from the very road, pausing a moment with startled alertness, then bounding off, a flash of brown and white, through the woods!

So long we loitered among these beauties, common to all the Rocky Mountains, that we were slow in reaching the wonders of the Park itself. Perhaps these days of adjustment to the wild and natural prepared us the better for what we were now to see.

In the morning of our second day within the Park we beheld afar off a valley rolling full of steam. It was as if a city lay hidden there, with smoke rising through the bright, cool air from a hundred busy chimneys. For a moment, so vivid was the impression, we almost expected to hear the city noises and smell the city smells; then we felt again, not without a pleasant sense of recovery, the solemn quiet of the forest spreading illimitably before our eyes, the splendid mountain-tops, the glimpses of blue lake, the charm of the winding road.

But the populous and smoky city of the imagination was now the eager desire of the heart. Certain sulphurous odors, suggestive of volcanic activity, had come to our nostrils; we had already seen a number of smoking rivulets oozing out of the earth near the roadside and creeping down through varicolored mud to the brook, and we had dismounted to dabble our fingers in the tepid water of our first hot spring. Now we rode out of the forest, and there

before us, on the shore of Yellowstone Lake,stretched the bare volcanic formation, a glaring white in the sunshine, steam rising from a score of grotesque mudcones and boiling poolsnature's imitation of a smoky city.

Here is a veritable miniature volcano, crater and all; a wooden sign names it a paint-pot. We stoop over and look into the steamy crater: a lake of pink mud is slowly rising within, rumbling and emitting sulphurous smells. Opening suddenly, it hurls the hot mud in air, splashing it almost into our faces, and slowly subsides with much grumbling, to repeat the operation again in a few minutes, as it has been doing these fifty thousand years and more. Not beautiful, but mysterious, curious, uncanny.

Here is a placid hot pool a dozen feet wide, set like a white-rimmed basin in the hard formation, with water so clear that one can see the marvelously colored sides extending deep into the earth-evanescent blue, cream-color, pink, red-attractive because so strange. A Chinaman has planted his laundry where he can dip up water heated by the earth's eternal fires for his washtubs. His clothes-line, with a brave array of new washing, cuts off a large portion of the volcanic landscape. Down at the lake-brink a number of girls are trying, with unaccustomed fishing-rods, to perform the feat, without which no visit to the Park would be quite successful, of catching a trout and cooking it, wriggling, in the hot pool behind

them. Afewrods away are the lunch-stations of the transportation companies, where the regular visitors in the big coaches stop for a meal, or possibly to stay for a night on their way around