's trouble, they
put their heads together, with the result that Dan Webster's daughter
spent a happy time in a seaside home, and came back very grateful, and
quite restored to health. The amateur detectives had done some good,
after all.

WHY THE SEA SOBS.

The Sea no father has,
Nor any mother:
A trouble quite enough
One's mind to bother.
That's why, my dear,
Where'er it be,
We sometimes hear
A sobbing Sea.

If we no fathers had,
Or loving mothers,
No little sisters fair,
No baby-brothers,
We'd shed a tear,
(Poor You, poor Me,)
And sigh, 'Oh, dear,'
Just like the Sea.

WONDERFUL CAVERNS.

XI.--THE GROTTOES OF ADELSBERG

About twenty miles north-east of Trieste, which stands at the north of
the Adriatic Sea, is the little town of Adelsberg. It is a market town,
and would have no more claim to notice than thousands of similar places
in Europe, had it not chanced to have been built within a mile of one of
the natural wonders of the world.

Thousands of years ago, when Europe was covered with dense forests, and
savage man was struggling for existence with savage man and yet more
savage beast, living in rude huts and ignorant of any kind of
civilisation, Nature was hard at work deep below the slopes of those
Adelsberg mountains. Age after age, with her simple tools of water,
lime, and carbonic acid, she dug, scooped, carved, and built, fashioning
by slow degrees vaulted chambers, halls with lofty domes, arches, and
galleries, all gleaming like frosted silver set with diamonds, far more
wonderful than Aladdin's palace, or the marble halls of the _Arabian
Nights_. And all the while, even when Christianity and civilisation
spread over the country, no one thought of the beautiful world down
below those grassy slopes; though now and again some one might wonder
why a deep basin in the hills, where according to tradition a lake once
existed, should have been turned into dry pasture, with only the little
river, Poyk or Pinka, running through it; or some more inquiring mind
might have been puzzled to know why that little river should suddenly
bury itself in the ground and vanish utterly from sight.

At last some enterprising being, a boy most likely, climbed into the
fissure down which the waters went, most probably in the summer-time
when the stream was low, and there discovered a cavern nearly three
hundred feet long