own to the broad ledge, from which he would in
all probability have bounded into the sea, the climbing was good, and,
panting with the exertion, he got from projection to ledge, now straight
down, now diagonally, and often along first one tiny ledge or cornice
and then another, zig-zagging, till, at about twenty feet from the place
he was making for, a slaty piece of the limestone rock by which he was
holding parted, frost-loosened, from the parent rock, and he went down
with a rush.

But it was only a slide. He alighted on his feet, and, scratched and
startled a bit, stood panting and trying to recover his composure.

"No harm done," he said, as he looked up to where the hole from which he
had escaped was beginning to look quite small. "Might have been worse.
Quite bad enough, though. Shakes one so. Now for a rest, and then down
again."

He stepped to the edge and looked over in the middle, next to the left,
then to the right, and always with the same result. He was now on a
regular sea-birds' sanctuary, for the rock below him was not
perpendicular; but sloped right under, and, try as he would, he could
devise no plan for getting down lower, save by taking a header into the
sea, where the water looked black and deep to his right, while to his
left there was the chasm upon which, twenty feet or so out of the
perpendicular line, was the hole from which he had come.

Heights of sea-cliffs are very deceptive, and slopes which look to the
inexperienced eye only a hundred feet or so to the top, are often more
than double. It was so here, for, in spite of the distance he had come
down, the midshipman found that he must be fully two hundred feet above
the sea.

"Oh, how vexatious!" he cried, as he ground his teeth. "After all that
work, after being so sure, to be out here on this wretched shelf like an
old cormorant, but without any wings."

"I don't care," he said aloud, after again and again convincing himself
that there was no possible means of farther descent. "I won't go back
to prison; I'll sit here and starve first. Not I," he added, after a
few moments' thought; "the cutter will be sure to sail by, and they
could see me if I made signals from just here."

Rather doubtful, as he knew, for he was only at the corner of the chasm
or tiny gulf into which the sea rushed, and the chances were that unless
he had something big and white to wave, he was not likely to get his
signal seen.

For one moment only t