Among the most beautiful stalactite caverns in this country is that on the island of Caldy, immediately opposite to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, discovered some years ago in the limestone cliff, and explored by Mr. Ayshford Sanford and the Rev. H. H. Winwood, in 1866, and subsequently by the writer in 1871 and 1872. On creeping through a narrow entrance with an outlook to the sea on a precipitous side of a quarry, a passage leads to a chamber of considerable horizontal extent, the bottom being covered with silt, on which stand pedestals of dripstone from an inch to two feet in length, each rising from a thin calcareous crust which does not altogether conceal the silt below. From it a low entrance leads into a fairy-like chamber, the floor consisting of a rich red, crystalline pavement, perfectly horizontal, and studded here and there with round bosses (Figs. 9, 10, 11), either red or snow-white. From the roof hang stalactites offering the same beautiful contrast of colours, forming a delicate canopy of tassels, or passing downwards to the floor and constituting slender shafts about three feet long, and about the diameter of straws. Each of these is hollow, translucent, and more or less traversed by water, and in some places each stood next its fellow, almost as close as the straws in a cornfield. Sometimes the shaft stands on a cone (Fig. 11) of dripstone, more or less raised above the floor. Small pools of water occupy hollows in the pavement, each lined with glittering crystals of calcite (Fig. 12), which are slowly shooting over the surface, and converting some of the open hollows into bottle-shaped cavities (Fig. 13). Their sides and bottoms are covered with a crystalline growth of singular beauty, of which an idea may be formed by woodcut 14, which represents the edge. Where the drip happened to fall into a shallow pool, it gradually built up for itself a cone, on the lower portion of which the varying water-level is marked by horizontal rings of crystals (Fig. 15), and the normal waterline by the upper horizontal plate. Sometimes these were united to the roof by a slender straw-shaft. In Figure 11 the original shaft has been broken away, and as the direction of the drip has slightly shifted, a new one gradually descended, until finally it became cemented to the side of the cone. [Illustration: FIG. 12.--Pools in Fairy Chamber.] [Illustration: FIG. 13.--Pool in Fairy Chamber.] [Illustration: FIG. 14.--Edge of Pool in Fairy Chamber.] [Illustration: FIG. 15.--Cone with Straw-column.]