After spending several days at the Mammoth Hot Springs, we started out to explore the greater marvels that awaited us in the interior.  The mode of travel through the Park is a succession of coaching-parties over a distance of one hundred and eighty miles.  The larger vehicles are drawn by six, the smaller ones by four, strong horses, well fed, well groomed, high spirited, yet safe.  This feature of our National Park astonished me.  I had formed no idea of its perfection or its magnitude.  Here, for example, are vehicles enough to accommodate seven hundred tourists for a continuous journey of five days!  Here, too, are five hundred horses, all of which can be harnessed at twenty-four hours’ notice; and, since the Park is so remote, here also are the company’s blacksmith and repair shops.  Within the stables, also, are the beautifully varnished coaches, varying in cost from one to two thousand dollars, and made in Concord, New Hampshire, twenty-five hundred miles away.  On one of these I read the number, “13-1/2.”  “Why did you add the fraction?” I inquired of the Manager of Transportation.  “Because,” he replied, “some travelers would not take a number thirteen coach.  They feared a breakdown or a tumble into the river; so I put on the half to take ill-luck away.”  I dwell at length upon these practical details, because I have found that people, in general, do not know them.  Most Americans have little idea whether the driving distance in the Park is ten miles, or a hundred.  Especially are they ignorant of the fact that they may leave the coaches at any point, remain at a hotel as long as they desire, and then resume their journey in other vehicles, without the least additional expense for transportation, precisely as one uses a stop-over ticket on a railroad.

[Illustration:  A COACHING-PARTY.]

[Illustration:  NO. 13-1/2.]

[Illustration:  HOTEL AT YELLOWSTONE LAKE.]

The fact that it is possible to go through the Park in four or five days is not a reason why it is best to do so.  Hundreds of tourists make the trip three times as rapidly as they would were they aware that they could remain comfortably for months.  When this is better known, people will travel here more leisurely.  Even now, parents with little children sometimes leave them at the Mammoth Springs Hotel in charge of nurses, and receive messages by telephone every day to inform them how they are.  An important consideration, also, for invalids is the fact that two skilled surgeons, attendant on the army, are always easily accessible.  Moreover, the climate of the Park in summer is delightful.  It is true, the sun beats down at noonday fiercely, the thin air offering scant resistance to its rays, but in the shade one feels no heat at all.  Light overcoats are needed when the sun goes down.  There is scarcely a night here, through the year, which passes without frost.  To me the pure dry air of that great height was more invigorating than any I had ever breathed, save, possibly, that of Norway, and it is, probably, the tonic of the atmosphere that renders even the invalid and aged able to support long journeys in the Park without exhaustion.  In all these years no tourist has been made ill here by fatigue.