and all wishing me good luck, the pleasant impression left with me will long be remembered, not only for the good feeling shown towards me, but because our meeting on that sharp curve at one of the most dangerous points of this dangerous mountain road might have terminated so differently and perhaps disastrously. Only once did I come near having any trouble with the wheel. In crossing the numerous dry creeks that run down the steep sides of the mountain, the road makes horse-shoe curves, descending rapidly down to the creek and then rising as sharply on the other side. In coasting down into these curved gullies, one has to get his feet back upon the pedals pretty lively in order to climb up the grade on the other side without dismounting, but once the wheel slowed up quicker than I expected, and before my feet were back on the pedals, the wheel turned straight across the road and rolled slowly to the edge of the precipice. I took one look down, my heart leaped into my mouth, and I sprang out of that saddle backwards quicker than I ever did before in my life. It was undecided for a few seconds whether the machine would go over the edge with or without me, but after balancing there for a year and a half, as I remember it, I got the best of gravity and finished the ride down to the geysers in safety. The distance from Napa, fifty-five miles, could easily have been made in a day, had I had a good meal in the middle of the day to work on; but as it was, I saw all there was to see in an hour, and after resting another hour was ready to start on before noon. Those who have visited the geysers lately, and also saw them a dozen or fifteen years ago, tell me the springs are not nearly as active now as they were then. I certainly was disappointed. It is surely a queer place up that narrow little cañon, with the different colored rocks--red, green, blue, yellow, and white ones--all crumbling down in one confused mass into the little stream of scalding hot water that runs down through the cañon. The sides of the cañon were sizzling and bubbling over with little hot springs, and the steam that escapes from the holes was sickening. It smelled like eggs that have passed their prime. Once I poked some of the crumbling stuff down into one of these little vent holes, and the creeping steam spitefully blew the hot sand-stones in my face and eyes. I pushed a stone a little larger than my fist into the most noisy hole, but the escaping steam barely moved it. Years ago, they tell me, a rock as large as a man could lift, would be thrown out of this hole with considerable force. The witches' caldron, a boiling pool of lead-colored water, not now over five or six feet in diameter, is the most active of any of the springs, but there is nothing that can be called a spouting geyser in the whole cañon.