the yellowstone once upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend into the yellowstone park without due thought.presently they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place,and that carter turned his team into his friend's team,howling:--"get out o'this,jim.all hell's alight under our noses!"and they called the place hell's half-acre to this day to witness if the carter lied.
we,too,the old lady from chicago,her husband,tom,and the good little mares,came to hell's half-acre,which is about sixty acres in extent,and when tom said:--"would you like to drive over it?"we said:--"certainly not,and if you do we shall report you to the park authorities."there was a plain,blistered,peeled,and abominable,and it was given over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud,and steam,and dirt at each other with whoops,and halloos,and bellowing curses.
the places smelled of the refuse of the pit,and that odor mixed with the clean,wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day.
this yellowstone park is laid out like ollendorf,in exercises of progressive difficulty.hell's half-acre was a prelude to ten or twelve miles of geyser formation.
we passed hot streams boiling in the forest;saw whiffs of steam beyond these,and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in the far distance;we trampled on sulphur in crystals,and sniffed things much worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper world;and so journeying,bewildered with the novelty,came upon a really park-like place where tom suggested we should get out and play with the geysers on foot.
imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime-beds,all the flowers of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime.
that was our first glimpse of the geyser basins.
the buggy had pulled up close to a rough,broken,blistered cone of spelter stuff between ten and twenty feet high.there was trouble in that place--moaning,splashing,gurgling,and the clank of machinery.a spurt of boiling water jumped into the air,and a wash of water followed.