Page:Curtis Club in Yellowstone Park.djvu/13

 proudly swinging enough rainbow trout to make a supper for everybody. They had dropped off of the four-horse stage five hours before and had had a fine time fishing, but they didn't have all of the fish that were in the party. When they got to the hotel about sunset they felt quite fine having the waiter bring them for supper the fish of their own catching.

The next morning they were in as big a hurry as they had been at the station the previous morning, for this was the day they were to see the Geysers. They started out before breakfast to examine this lower Geyser basin—wonder of wonders! Across an open plain they saw in the distance water and steam showering upward like five hundred fire engines, all trying to put out the sun, but in a minute it was gone.

"Gee! What is that?" asked several boys at once. "Fountain Geyser," answered Dr. Curtis.

"How soon will it spout again?" "You can't tell exactly. It may be two hours and it may be four. Let's go and look at it now that it is quiet."

When they got there it had an open crater like a volcano, thirty feet across, very deep, nearly full of clear blue water and lined with beautiful limestone that had been left there by the geyser water. The same kind of limestone covered acres of ground around. Near-by were the Mammoth Paint Pots, really a mud volcano, a hole big enough to drop a house into, and boiling, boiling, boiling, all the time with steam that keeps popping through the paint like mud in the bottom.

That was a wonderful day for the boys. They saw the Prismatic Lake, a spring in a raised basin as large as a city block and in which the water appears to be blue and green and yellow and orange and flows over the edges of the basin on all sides at once. They were so busy looking at the other curiosities that they forgot to see the Fountain Geyser when it started, but they hurried back to it before its fifteen minutes' eruption was half over. The water flew out of it in jets as high as the second or third-story windows of a house but occasionally it went as high as a church steeple.