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Show 1836- 1837] Flagg's Far West 295 XXVI " When breath and sense have left this day, In yon damp vault, oh lay me not; But kindly bear my bones away To some lone, green, and sunny spot." " Away to the prairie! away! Where the sun- gilt flowers are waving, When awaked from their couch at the breaking of day, O'er the emerald lawn the gay zephyrs play, And their pinions in dewdrops are laving." 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 |