up an incline of dry clay, the room widening gradually until its width is forty feet, when we reach the top of an elevation thirty feet above the starting point, where a sudden steep descent brings us to a halt.  A stone cast down strikes water and the sound of a splash comes back to us.  With caution we seek our way down the hill and stand on the edge of a small lake or pond.  Suddenly my son, who is in the lead, rushes back saying:  ‘Look out!  I put my hand on a snake.’  Some of us, being armed with hickory canes that had been thrown down, concentrated our lights and advanced.  Sure enough, there is a snake a yard long coiled up on a section of rotten wood.  It proves to be a copperhead, the most quarrelsome and vicious snake in this country; but his nature is changed so that he makes no effort to fight and is killed with a blow, and is sent to be hoisted up that we may examine him in daylight.  No others were found, and probably he had fallen in at the opening, and spent a long, weary time in expiation of his upper-earth crimes.

“Examining the lake we find it to be about forty feet wide and the same long, and it fills the room from wall to wall.  We cannot pass it so must either stop or wade through.  We decide to wade, and on measuring the water find it only two or three feet deep, with a soft clay bottom, and in many places islands of stalagmite rise above the surface.

“On the sides of the lake there are formations in the shape of sofas and lounges, and they appear to be cushioned, but the cushions are found to be hard, solid rock.  As the lights advance across the lake new wonders are revealed.  Curtains and draperies hanging from the top almost touch the water and entirely cut off the view beyond.  Passing under a curtain at one of the highest places, we emerge from the lake, and once more on dry land, advance up a slope.  Here the water formations have taken human shapes of all sizes and several colors now appear and help to present a chaos of beauty.

“Two hundred feet more and the chamber ends in a vast waterfall, but the water has turned to stone.  Above the waterfall is an opening, but it is twenty-five feet up a smooth wall and we have no ladder.  The journey was at an end.  Tired, wet and muddy, we started on our return trip; recrossed the dark lake, and retraced our steps to the place under the opening without realizing that we had spent six hours under ground.  While the other members of the party, and the specimens, were being raised to the surface, the writer sought to learn the flora and fauna of this new region.  The flora is blank.  Even the white mold so common in many caves is absent; and no fungus grows on the poles, bark and rotten wood that have at some past time been cast in.

“In animal life the range is greater.  I have mentioned the ever-present bats, and dozens of them were seen.  There were also small, white eyeless salamanders, small,