You cannot do the cave in much less than four days, owing to the determination of the coach-driver and the keeper of the hotel to delay tourists as much as possible. I still recall my first experience, and the second and third have not been in any essential respect dissimilar. The train reached Cave City at twelve o’clock, but the vehicle that was to convey me to the vast cavern would not leave for more than two hours, this arrangement being entered into by interested parties to secure each passenger for dinner at the railway station inn. The conveyance takes its departure very leisurely, and before you are fairly inside or outside, as the case may be, you are obliged to pay not only your fare to the cave, but your fare back, even if you have no intention of returning for a month. This ruffles most people, and impregnates them with the notion that the astuteness of negotiations in that neighborhood is not far removed from swindling—a notion apt to be strengthened as they go on. Arriving at the Mammoth Cave Hotel, a great, rambling, ill-kept, uncomfortable collection of frame buildings, of the kind of which travellers in the South cannot be ignorant, you are informed that you are too late to enter the cave on that day. There are two routes—the long, and short; the former extending nine miles from the mouth of the cavern, and the latter three miles. The day following you can do either of these, but if you want to do both you must remain two days. There is no need of this, since a strong man, accustomed to exercise, can make the double subterranean journey in ten or twelve hours without difficulty. Were he to do so, however, the rustic Boniface would lose the price of one day’s board; and hence the tourist must be put to serious inconvenience and delay for merely mercenary reasons. Men frequently offer to pay twice or thrice the rate of the day’s board for the privilege of making the entire underground journey in a single day. This is refused, because it would fully expose the trick, and give an opportunity for victims to advertise the fraud. You may grumble—that is the privilege of every free-born citizen—but you can’t help yourself. The public house employs the guides, and the guides will do nothing contrary to the annoying and cheating customs it has established. The hotel, the coachmen, and the guides, are in league one with the other, and as there is only one Mammoth Cave, and only one way of getting into it, if you are really determined to see it, you may growl and swear as much as you please, but you must conform to the rules that have been laid down for the private benefit of the little ring, and for your own disadvantage. [Sidenote: DISCOVERY OF THE CAVE.] [Sidenote: A NARROW AND MISTAKEN POLICY.]