Year: 1861

"Were you ever in the Mammoth Cave
| It is, with all its wonders, the most God for
saken, dreary, gloomy spot mortal ever enter
| ed. Yet there is some strange mystic power
in the place to trans6gure the weakest most
wretched music into harmony fit for the celes-
tial 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 a 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 fancifnlly eoored bloomer dresses
and with the upfted lanterns, present a strange
and weird appearance as the boat is pushed
from the shore, and floats down into the black
gloom, the lights refiectiug themselves on the
surface OF the deadly still water, and lighting
up with strange effect the arch of rock over
head. 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 on earth 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 ont
into life and light the little boat Of baby
voyager. The stream issues from dark rocky
cavern, mysterious and unknown. Such a
stream is this on which we are embarked
Silent and gloomy, dark and mysterious, it
serves as a 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
Al l. Ia. ;,h Ii.
wrecked voyager might find temporary foot
ing. Above, sometimes SO low that you must
crouch to avoid it, and again so high as to be
scarcely visible, rises the Fock-roof, while the
water in which you glide is thirty feet in depth
and as cold as the brow of a corpse There is
no sound but the ripping made by the boat;
not a cricket along the shoreless stream, not a
fish to plunge mp and flash moment in the
air before returning to its waterY home-no
symptom of life-no sound, no motion, save
that made by ourselves.


"Hark there is sound | Far off delicate
Shade OF music, so faint as to seem the ghost
of some wandering echo. But by degrees it
increases. 1t becomes clear and defined. Rich
harmony, trembling with strange sensuous wild
ness, futtering around the rocky projections,
swelling in waves of harmony to the arched
roof above. Now it appears to come from
one direction, now from another. Anon q
higher note or strain is heard, like some clear
voice rising above q mighty chorus Never
did syren sing more magic songs to listening
iraveer-never did the mysterious maiden of
Lurleiburg chant more enhancing melody to
the unwary boatman who floats along the
moonlit Rhine.


Suddenly q 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 cornet. There are the
syrens, these the Lurlines of Echo river. Out
on the earth's surface their music would be
merely quaint and odd but here, in the
Mammoth Cave, it is weird and unearthly.


Floating away, out of sight of the above
minstrels-who are, in fact, the barber, boot
black, or waiter from the hotel at the mouth
of the cave-their music resumes its supernat-
ural 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 reminiscence of
visit to the Mammoth Cave"