Year: 1861

| w ere you ever in the Mammoth Cave
1t is, with all its wonders, the most God-forsa-
ken, dreary, gloomy spot mortal ever entered.
Yet, there is some strange mystic power in the
place to transfgure the weakest, most wretch
ed music into harmony fit for the celestial
spheres.


After poking about in the bowels of the
earth, for three or four hours visitors to the
Cave arrive at Echo River. where they embark
on disgustingly muddy scow, or, if the party
is large enough, two or three wretched boats
are brought into requisition. The women are
all dressed in fancifuy colored bloomer attire
and with the upifted lanterns, present a
strange and wierd appearance, as the boat is
pushed from the shore, and floats down into
the black gloom, the lights rejecting them
selves on the surface of the deadly still water,
and lighting up with strange effect the arch of
rock overhead. When they are fairly out of
sight we enter the other boat, and ourselves
push out into the dark stream Dark, awfuly
dark it is. The dark river of death finds no
more vivid parallel than this. You know, in
the first picture of Coles Voyage of Life,
the gloomy river of the past from which floats
out into life and light the little boat of the
baby voyager The stream issues from dark,
rocky cavern, mysterious and unknown
Such a stream is this on which we are embark
ed. Silent and gloomy, dark and mysterious,
it serves as type of the past and the future
of the past mystery whence all life evolves
of the inscrutable future whittier all life tends


"The feeling of security is not very great.
The boats sink down almost to the waters
edge, and the perpendicular slippery rock on Ell
ther side offers no ledge on which shipwreck-
ed voyager might find a temporary looting.-
Above, sometimes so low that you must crouch
to avoid it, and again so high as to be hardly
visible, rises the rock roof, while the water in
which you glide is thirty feet in depth, and as
cold as the brow of corpse There is no
sound but the ripping made by the boat not
a cricket along the shoreless stream, not fish
to plunge up and flash moment in the air be-
fore returning to its watery home-no symp-
toms of life-no sound, no motion, save that
made by ourselves.


Hark there is sound Far off a deli
cate shade of music so faint as to seem the
ghost of some wandering echo. But by degrees
1t increases. 1t becomes clear and defined
Rich harmony, trembling with strange scnsuogs
wildness, fluttering around the wattery proiec-
tions, swelling in waves of harmony to the
arched roof above. Now it appears to come
from one direction, now from another Anon
higher note or strain is heard, like some clear
voice rising above mighty chorus. Never
did syren sing more magic songs to listening
traveler-never did the mysterious maiden of
Lurleiburg chaunt more enhancing melody to
the unwary boatman who floats along the
moonlight Rhine


Suddenly turn of the boat brings you
opposite break in the perpendicular rocky
shore, and perched upon mass of broken rock,
you see party of four negroes playing upon
violins and coronet. Those are the syrens.
these the Lurlines of Echo river. Out on the
earths surface their music would be merely
quaint and odd, but here, in the Mammoth
Cave, it is wierd and unearthly.


Floating away, out of sight of the above
minstres-who are, in fact, the bootbacks, or
walters from the hotel at the mouth of the
cave-their music resumes its supernatural
tones and effect, and so, until we land at the
opposite shore of the dark river, it haunts the
ear with its peculiar harmony, while ever after
it forms the most vivid "reminiscences of a visit
to the Mammoth Cave"