ON and about the sulphur mountains are a great many curious sights, and none more singular than the various-colored clays. At the distance of several miles the contrast between the sulphur beds and the different kinds of clay was so great, that the hills looked as if they had been experimented on by a company of painters, so clearly did they show their coats of many colors. I stopped some time admiring the great steam-blast and its blubbering neighbor, the gigantic cauldron of boiling mud. Fury! I wonder how beef and plum pudding would boil, if wrapped in a tight bag and immersed in this boiling clay. Very well, no doubt. Methinks ’twas very wise in the Almighty placing these prominent and numerous exhibitions of internal heat in a “far off” and thinly peopled land, where all the folks are incurious, and not disposed to pry into nature’s sublime secrets farther than she chooses to show them. Now, if these ebullitions of old Dame Nature’s cauldron were in America, some shrewd Yankee or joint-stock company would go to boring right down to the center, to get at the fountain head; and after getting a supply of steam, proceed to let it out in streams, to turn grist-mills, saw logs, cook hotel dinners, pump water, drain marshes, and do many other “acts and things that a free and independent” people “may of right do.” They would dig for gold, and finding it not, be content with fire. With that fire they would cook, roast and boil, warm themselves, and make baths. With the steam they would turn machinery and spin cotton. Whatever compound of metals, mines, or elements they found, of that they would make riches, or at any rate attempt it, and some would succeed. Some, I fear, would come off as the alchemist in Festus did, when the Devil taught him. Lucifer, in the garb of a gentleman, and manners of a scholar, says—
“I have a secret I would fain impart
To one who would make right use of it. Now mark!
Chemists say there are fifty elements,
And more;—would’st know a ready recipe
For riches?
FRIEND. That, indeed, I would, good sir.
LUCIFER. Get, then, these fifty earths, or elements,
Or what not. Mix them up together. Put
All to the question. Tease them well with fire,