drinkable, our appetites craved only chocolate, which we could not obtain. Our heads were dizzy, and our limbs were weary, and we lay down in a dense smoke to try to sleep. DESCENT INTO THE CRATER. "Morning came to our relief, and with it the film had passed from our eyes. We looked up to the top of the mountain above us, and then down into that fearful abyss into which we were soon to descend. We could eat no breakfast, and could drink no coffee, and so we were soon ready for our day's journey. We followed a narrow footpath until we reached a shelf, where we were seated in a skid, and let down by a windlass 500 feet or so, to a landing-place, from which we clambered downward to a second windlass and a second skid, which was the most fearful of all, because we were dangling about without any thing to steady ourselves, as we descended before the mouth of one of those yawning caverns, which are called the 'breathing-holes' of the crater. They are so called from the fresh air and horrid sounds that continually issue from them. But we shut our eyes and clung fast to the rope, as we whirled round and round in mid air, until we reached another landing-place about 500 feet lower. From this point we clambered down, as best we could, until we came among the men digging up cinders, from which sulphur, in the form of brimstone, is made. "We took no measurements within the crater, and heights and distances here can only be given by approximation. We only know that all things are on a scale so vast that old Pluto might here have forged new thunder-bolts, and Milton's Satan might have here found the material for his sulphurous bed. All was strange, and wild, and frightful. "We crawled into several of the 'breathing holes,' but nothing was there except darkness visible. The sides and bottom were, for the most part, polished by the molten mass, which had cooled in passing through them; and if it had not been for the ropes around our waist, we should have slipped and fallen we knew not whither. We almost fancied that, in the moving currents of air, we heard the wailings of the lost in the great sulphurous lake below. The stones we threw in were lost to sound unless they hit upon a projecting rock, and fell from shelf to shelf. The deep darkness was fearful to contemplate. The abyss looked as though it might be the mouth of the bottomless pit. What must have been the effect when each one of these 'breathing holes' was vomiting liquid fire and sulphur into the basin in which we stood? How immeasurable must be that lake whose overflowings fill such cavities as this! It is when standing in such a place that we get the full force of the figures used by the Scriptures in illustrating the condition of the souls that have perished forever.