On the morning of my arrival at Grafton, while my brisk little hostess was making ready for my necessities, I stepped out to survey the place, and availed myself of an hour of leisure to visit a somewhat remarkable cavern among the cliffs, a little below the village, the entrance of which had caught my attention while awaiting the movements of the ferryman on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. It is approached by a rough footpath along the {40} river-margin, piled up with huge masses of limestone, which have been toppled from the beetling crags above: these, at this point, as before stated, are some hundred feet in perpendicular height. The orifice of the cave is elliptical in outline, and somewhat regular, being an excavation by the whirling of waters apparently in the surface of the smooth escarpment; it is about twenty feet in altitude, and as many in width. Passing the threshold of the entrance, an immediate expansion takes place into a spacious apartment some forty or fifty feet in depth, and about the same in extreme height: nearly in the centre a huge perpendicular column of solid rock rears itself from the floor to the roof. From this point the cavern lengthens itself away into a series of apartments to the distance of several hundred feet, with two lesser entrances in the same line with that in the middle, and at regular intervals. The walls of the cave, like everything of a geological character in this region, are composed of a secondary limestone, abounding in testaceous fossils. The spot exhibits conclusive evidence of having once been subject to diluvial action; and the cavern itself, as I have observed, seems little else than an excavation from the heart of an enormous mass of marine petrifaction. Large quantities of human bones of all sizes have been found in this cavern, leaving little doubt that, by the former dwellers in this fair land, the spot was employed as a catacomb. I myself picked up the _sincipital_ section of a scull, which would have ecstasied a virtuoso beyond measure; and {41} several of the _lumbar vertebræ_, which, if they prove nothing else, abundantly demonstrate the aboriginal natives of North America to have been no pigmy race. The spot is now desecrated by the presence of a party of sturdy coopers, who could not, however, have chosen a more delightful apartment for their handicraft; rather more taste than piety, however, has been betrayed in the selection. The view of the water and the opposite forest from the elevated mouth of the cavern is very fine, and three or four broad-leafed sycamores fling over the whole a delightful shade. The waters of the river flow onward in a deep current at the base, and the fish throw themselves into the warm sunlight from the surface. What a charming retreat from the fiery fervour of a midsummer noon!