b of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in
each of these bold promontories--the terminal horns of the
crescent--there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in
which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is
at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the
stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave
in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of
the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small
perforations--the largest of them not a great deal wider than the
blow-hole of a porpoise--that open externally among the cliffs above;
and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore
like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which
they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that
it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten
whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in
two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from
sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the
extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in
his famous witch-scene in "Faust," to the Hartz crags, they would do
well to visit this bold headland during some winter tempest from the
east, and find his description perfectly sober and true:

"See the giant crags, oh ho!
How they snort and how they blow!"

Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches
when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon cave which we had come to
explore, hollowed for about a hundred and fifty feet in the line of a
fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall
erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighbouring lands, with
the intention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cavern; but
his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk
into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our
footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came
whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor
sounded hollow to the tread; we saw the green mossy sides, which close
in the uncertain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by
ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they retired from
the vegetative influences; and m