slip down with it double and then
draw it off. No: it is not long enough, and we should have to leave the
axe behind. I must climb above you, boy; so here goes."

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

THE CRYSTAL GROTTO.

Dale threw down the rope from his shoulder, took off hat and jacket,
replaced the rope like a scarf, and then stood looking upwards.

"Oh, pray be careful!" cried Saxe, rather faintly.

"Yes, miss," said Dale mockingly. "Why don't you come and take hold of
my hand! There, boy, I have climbed before now, and I'll be as careful
as I can. Hah! that's the better way. `Take it coolly,' Saxe, as Jacob
Faithful used to say. I'll soon have you down."

He went along the chasm a few yards, and then began to climb up the
nearly perpendicular face of the rock, taking advantage of every niche
and projection, and gradually getting higher and higher, but always
farther away from where Saxe hung watching him with lips apart, and in
constant dread lest there should be a sudden slip and a fall.

"And that would make it horrible," thought the lad. "What should I do
then?"

Dale climbed on talking the while when he did not give vent to a
good-humoured grunt over some extra difficult bit.

Saxe said nothing, for he felt hurt. It seemed to him that his
companion was treating him like a child, and saying all kinds of moral
things in a light way, so as to keep up his spirits; and, as Dale saw
the effect his words produced, he said less.

"Rather a tough bit of climbing," he cried, after a few minutes'
silence; "but I've had worse to do: for I've gone over pieces like this
when there has been a fall of a thousand feet or so beneath me, and that
makes one mind one's p's and q's, Saxe--precipices and queer spots--eh?
But I shall soon do this. All it wants is a little, coolness and
determination."

"Why are you going so far along that way!" cried Saxe, who liked this
tone better.

"Because the line of the stratum runs this way, and higher up there is
another goes off at an angle right above where you are; and there is a
projection, if I can reach it, which will do for the rope: I could see
it all from down below."

Saxe watched him breathlessly till he was on a level with the opening by
which he clung, but fully forty yards away. There he turned and began
to climb back, and always rising higher till he was some thirty feet
higher than the opening, but still considerably to Saxe's right.

"Now," he said quietly,