as his
breast scraped over the rough rock.

Soon after,--

"Oh, how sore my hands are! That's better."

He was back in safety on the ledge over the hole, and, passing along, he
had soon descended to the one beneath the exit.

"Now then," he said, as he paused for a few minutes before commencing
his descent; "this will be easier."

Somehow he did not feel in any hurry to begin, and he sat down with his
legs hanging over the ledge, to give his nerves time to calm down, for
there was a strong tendency to throb about his pulses, and he was not
sufficiently conversant with the house he lived in, to know that
confinement, worry, want of fresh air, and excessive work during the
past few days had not given him what the doctors call "tone."

So he sat there with his back to the rock, gazing out to sea again, and
then watching the graceful curves made by a gull, which had risen higher
and higher, and came nearer and nearer, till it was on a level with him,
and watching him curiously.

"Wonder whether you think I am going to fall and let you have a pick at
me," said Archy, with a forced laugh; "because I am not going to tumble,
so you can be off."

All the same, though, he shuddered, and he had to exercise a little
force to make his new start downward.

"Best way after all," he said, as he began to descend. "If you go up,
it gets more dangerous every minute, because you have farther to fall.
If you go down, it gets safer, because you have less."

He found the way now comparatively easy, for the rock sloped a little
out, and he had even got down some sixty feet when he had a check.

"I don't know, though," he said, as he put a bleeding knuckle to his
lips. "Don't make much difference, I should think, whether you fall one
hundred feet or five. Bother! I wish I did not keep on thinking about
tumbling."

He forced himself to study the next part of his descent, which was
nearly perpendicular, but well broken up with ledges and cracks which
offered good holding, and terminated a hundred feet below, upon a shelf,
which naturally offered itself as his next resting-place, but beyond
which it was impossible to see.

"Don't matter," he said more cheerfully. "Let's take difficulties a bit
at a time. I'm free, and I can laugh at them now. I could jump into
deep water and swim, if there were no way down from below there."

His spirits rose now, for, though a false step or slip of the foot would
have sent him headlong d