peckydillo chaps as we hear going about in the woods o' nights. So I
thought we'd bring some dips, and if we didn't want 'em we could only
bring 'em back again."

By this time they were ascending a rugged slope, and painfully climbing
in and out among huge rocks, whose structure told of their being
portions of some lava eruption. Water trickled here and there, overhung
by mosses of loose habit and of a dazzling green. Tree ferns arched
over the way with their lace-work fronds, and here and there clumps of
trees towered up, showing that it must have been many generations since
fire had devastated this part of the island, and the huge masses of lava
had been formed in a long, river-like mass, to be afterwards broken up
and piled by some convulsion in the fragments amongst which they
clambered.

"Wonderful! Wonderful!" cried Oliver.

"Grand!" exclaimed Drew. "Look at the Nepenthes," and he pointed to the
curiously metamorphosed leaves of the climbers around, each forming a
pitcher half full of water.

"I want to know how you discovered it," said Oliver.

"Oh, you must ask these fellows," replied Panton.

"It were Billy Wriggs, sir, goin' after a bird I'd shot in that
robuschus way of his'n, and when I follered him and see what a place it
were I was obliged to come on."

"Why, we must be getting up toward an old crater," cried Oliver. "There
has been a volcanic eruption here."

"Then just be a bit patient," said Panton, laughing. "Only up as high
as that ridge," he continued, panting, "and then we're close at hand."

It was hot and toilsome work, but the party were in so lovely a natural
garden that the toil was forgotten. For the trees of great growth were
farther apart up here, leaving room for the sunshine to penetrate, with
the result that the undergrowth was glorious, and the rocky dells and
precipices magnificent.

"Straight away. Up to the top here," cried Panton. "Come along."

He was foremost, and had reached a tremendous piled-up wall of masses of
mossy stone, whose crevices formed a gorgeous rockery of flowers and
greenery, wonderful to behold, almost perpendicular, but so full of
inequalities that offered such excellent foot and hand hold that there
was very little difficulty in the ascent. He began at once seizing
creeper and root, and was about half way up, when there was a snarling
yell, and a great cat-like creature sprang out of a dark crevice,
bounded upward and was gone, while Pant