Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/302

258 for the cries of children and the mewing of cats. They were jet black and hideously ugly, having misshapen bodies, large heads, and great round eyes, always red as if from weeping; nor was their ill-favoured appearance redeemed by a sweetness of disposition, as they were invariably crabbed and malicious. We are told that they were cunning workers in metals, and that the swords manufactured by them, were as flexible as rushes, and as hard as diamonds. The gnomes figured in our illustration must be the last of their race; indeed, we are inclined to believe that those quaint dwarfs are merely creations of our artist's fancy.

The reader, however, must not suppose that the description we have given of the Gnome Palace is the offspring of imagination. Such caverns do really exist beneath the surface of this planet, and their fantastic architecture is the result of the percolation of water through limestone; their pillars, arches, and stony icicles having been moulded out of the calcareous matter which the fluid dissolved while infiltrating through the fissures and cavities of overlying beds of rock.

The Grotto of Antiparos, in the Grecian Archipelago, is a gnome palace quite as wonderful as that we have just pictured. Countless stalactites depending from above, together with an indescribable accumulation of crystallized masses on the walls, ornament a chamber with an arched roof upwards of one hundred and twenty feet in length. The