of Carlyle--"they were our own, and no
other man's."

The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment The larger cave proved
a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on
the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky
sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in
creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influences of the
sea-spray; the pale yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before,
save in gardens and shrubberies; and on a deeply-shaded slope that
leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the
sweet-scented woodroof of the flower-plot and parterre, with its pretty
verticillate leaves, that become the more odoriferous the more they are
crushed, and its white delicate flowers. There, too, immediately in the
opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in
detached drops from the over-beetling precipice above, like the first
drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass,
with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had
used in his voyages; above all, _there_ were the caves with their
pigeons--white, variegated, and blue--and their mysterious and gloomy
depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In
a short time we had broken off with our hammers whole pocketfuls of
stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of
the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the
commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and
but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish
moorland stream, and shows the newly-formed needles of ice projecting
mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of
deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows
seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them; the
springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges; and
the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were
built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the
sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while
all around was dark as midnight--the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen
for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine--the
black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of
spray, and then, turning downwards, disp