other, bother! what's the good!"

"How do I know? It's very curious. There's something seems to draw you
on when you are underground," said Scarlett, dreamily.

"Hark at the old worm! Why, Scar, I believe you'd like to live
underground."

Scarlett shook his head.

"I mean to find that way in to our place some day, whether you help me
or whether you do not. Never mind what your Samson said about the Rill
caves. He don't know. Let's go and see."

"What's the good?"

"I don't know that it will be any good, but let's see. There may be all
kinds of strange things in a cave. I've read about wonderful places
that went into the earth for a long way."

"Yes; but our Rill cave would not. My father told me one day about two
caves he went into in Derbyshire. One had a little river running out of
it, and he went in and walked by the side of the water for a long way
till he came to a black arch, and there the gentlemen who were with him
lit candles and they waded into the water and crept under the dark arch,
and then went on and on for a long way through cave after cave, all wet
and dripping from the top. Sometimes they were obliged to wade in the
stream, and sometimes they walked along the edge."

"And what did they find?"

"Mud," said Fred, laconically.

"Nothing else?"

"No; only mud, sticky mud, no matter how far they went; and at last they
got tired of it, and turned back to find that the water had risen, and
was close up to the top of the arch under which they had crept, so that
they had to wait half a day before it went down."

"What made the water rise?" asked Scarlett; "the tide?"

"No; there were no tides there right in among the hills."

"Then how was it?"

"There had been a storm, and the water had run down and filled the
little river."

As they chatted, the lads walked steadily on, and began to ascend the
long, low eminence, which formed, as it were, the large body of the
couchant lion, but which from where they were, seemed like the most
ordinary of hills.

"There was another cave, too, that my father went into, but that was
very different. It was high up in among the hills, and you went down
quite a hole to get to it, and then it was just as if the inside of the
hill had come full of cracks and splits along which he kept climbing and
walking with the two sides just alike, just as if the stone had been
broken in two."

"Then this was stone, not mud," said Scarlett, who was deeply
int