Chapter 31
Now to return to Tom and Becky's share in the picnic.
They tripped along the murky aisles with the rest of the company,visiting the familiar wonders of the cave— wonders dubbed with rather overdescriptive names,such as“The Drawing Room,”“The Cathedral,”“Aladdin's Palace,”and so on.
Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking began,and Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the exertion began to grow a trifle wearisome;
then they wandered down a sinuous avenue holding their candles aloft and reading the tangled webwork of names,dates,post-office addresses,and mottoes with which the rocky walls had been frescoed （in candle smoke）.
Still drifting along and talking,they scarcely noticed that they were now in a part of the cave whose walls were not frescoed.
They smoked their own names under an overhanging shelf and moved on.Presently they came to a place where a little stream of water,trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment with it,had,in the slow-dragging ages,formed a laced and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone.
Tom squeezed his small body behind it in order to illuminate it for Becky's gratification.
He found that it curtained a sort of steep natural stairway which was enclosed between narrow walls,and at once the ambition to be a discoverer seized him.
Becky responded to his call,and they made a smoke mark for future guidance,and started upon their quest.
They wound this way and that,far down into the secret depths of the cave,made another mark,and branched off in search of novelties to tell the upper world about.
In one place they found a spacious cavern,from whose ceiling depended a multitude of shining stalactites of the length and circumference of a man's leg;they walked all about it,wondering and admiring,and presently left it by one of the numerous passages that opened into it.
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