le
place to a man living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a
dead wife. So far as could be ascertained--for the nailer himself was
rather close in the matter--he had not entered the cave at all. He
seemed, judging from the marks of scraping left along the sides for
about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand
outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to
have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to
the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of
stalactite. It was, of course, seen that his specimens would not suit
Sir George; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to
my uncles, though with some little unwillingness, as it was known that
no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles
were, however, delighted with the commission--it was all for the benefit
of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they
set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them--a very happy
boy--armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared
devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George.

I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now
witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto
of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably
both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior--as
is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated--to a cave almost
entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the
east; and yet even _it_ had its interest. It widened, as one entered,
into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp
and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by
the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of
the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended
many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave,
however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied
character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the
Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung
by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the
semicircle project on either side into deep water--into at least water
so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during
the eb