an invalid has swallowed a bowlful of it with keen relish, and then learned with indignant surprise that the soup was cooked in the reeking kitchen of his Satanic Majesty down deep in the bowels of the earth, and was as innocent of any contact with even the shadow of terrestrial chicken as any you could obtain at the best hotel in Saratoga, or the most fashionable boarding-house in New York. An iron pipe has been driven down deep into the earth at this point, and on letting down some fresh eggs in an open-work wire cage through the tube, you can have them hard boiled in Nature's kettle inside of three minutes.
In front of the hotel stands a curious rude grotto or summer-house, apparently composed wholly of short sections of tree-trunks, unhewn and rough, placed endwise one upon another. A closer inspection reveals the fact that the trees from which these sections were broken were of solid stone. Ages and ages ago there stood upon the summit of one of the mountain ridges on the west of the valley, some seven miles from the present site of Calistoga, a grove of great redwood trees, which, by some process of nature, became changed into stone, more enduring and permanent than the "everlasting hills" themselves. For years the fact of the existence of this phenomenon was unknown to the residents of the vicinity, the thick chapparal effectually hiding the fallen trunks from view. In 1870, one of the terribly destructive fires which sweep over the mountains of California and Oregon year after year, laid bare the summit of this hill range, and the ground was found strewn
