Large blocks have become detached from time to time forming a glass slide into the lake. Obsidian is a species of lava. Pliny says this glass was first found in Ethiopia, but the only glass mountain in the world stands on the shore of Beaver Lake. The Indians used this glass for arrow heads and in making sharp-edged tools.
The swampy, lily-padded margin of Beaver Lake is haunted by wild geese. This lake is the beaver’s own. These industrious little animals constructed it by damming up Green Creek for a distance of two miles. Some thirty dams sweep in graceful curves from side to side each having a fall from two to six feet.
OLD FAITHFUL GEYSER, YELLOWSTONE PARK, JUST BEFORE AN ERUPTION.
The geyser basins are places of unusual interest and beauty. No scene in the park is lovelier than these areas of bubbling pools, boiling lakes and steaming geysers, at sunrise, when the columns of white steam, tinged to a roseate hue by the rising sun, ascending against the background of dark green pines. Presently,—
“There came o’er the perturbed waves
Loud-crashing, terrible, a sound that made
Either shore tremble, as if a wind
Impetuous, from conflicting vapors sprung,
That ’gainst some forest driving with all his might,