The _Flume_ is about two hundred yards in extent, its greatest height is sixty or seventy feet, and has a general width of about twenty feet. Its smooth sides have been excavated with the most singular evenness, and its bed is littered up with rocky rubbish, over which brawls the mountain brook that leaps into sight at the further end of this remarkable corridor. At that end we find the most wonderful feature of the _Flume_, for there it suddenly contracts to a width of not more than ten feet, and in its jaws holds suspended over the cascade a huge rock twelve feet in height, and which, being undoubtedly a _boulder_, has rolled from above into the chasm, and there been held by its slight excess of breadth--not more than _two inches_ at the utmost. [Illustration: THE FLUME.] There being neither trees, nor shrubs, nor herbage of any sort, save the luxuriant mosses nourished by the eternal moisture, to break the long vista of the Flume, it presents a very novel appearance to the visitor issuing from the dense wood below, and catching a sudden and complete view of its steep, dripping walls, and rocky bed, terminating with the suspended boulder and the Cascade flashing underneath; while the tall hemlocks above the cliffs, shut out all save a small patch of blue sky. Ordinarily the stream is very low, and visitors can not only pick their way over rocks and logs to the foot of the Cascade, but can clamber over the granite ledges and pass under the suspended boulder that looks as if at any moment it might slip through upon them. This feat of passing under the rock is always a very _damp_ one, though during the season, troops of damsels may be seen bravely accomplishing it, scornful of the rock above and the wet below--and doing it too without the confident freedom of the _Bloomer dress_! As the Flume is little penetrated by the sun's rays, the eternal moisture of its depths makes it advisable for those disposed to linger in them, to take abundant extra clothing; fur during the warmest summer-day, when an artist issues from its damp walls after a long siege of its curiosities with canvas and colors, he looks as if he were rehearsing the favorite circus-feat of throwing off multitudinous jackets and vests! By following up the ravine beyond the suspended rock, the visitor can ascend the cliffs overhanging the Flume; and if he or she have nerve enough, a large hemlock fallen across the chasm affords spacious footing whence a fine bird's-eye view of the ravine may be enjoyed. In winter and in spring the Flume is said to present a scene of fearful interest--now bearded with icicles, and anon, from melting snows, filled with a torrent of ice and fallen timber crashing in thunder through its jaws, to be launched more freely over the broad slope of the Cascade below. Until very recently this extraordinary ravine was wholly unknown, and it is to be regretted that we have no authentic chronicle of the gradual cutting of the Flume by the action