To this delay was added another. The _Amethyst_ had sprung her maintopmast in a sudden gale of wind, one of those "Bermuda squalls" so dreaded by all navigators of those seas, and she had suffered other damages, which compelled the Captain to place her in the hands of the dockyard people; thus, as there was plenty of leave-going, Derval was frequently on shore, and on one of these occasions a rather curious adventure befel him. Joe Grummet had prepared Derval for seeing much that was novel in these Summer Isles, as they were not inaptly named from Sir George Summers, who was driven there in a storm in 1609, and whose heart is buried in one of them; but Joe could not prevail upon him to accept the genuine old nautical idea that the land and the coral crust composing it is so thin as to be easily broken, even by a stroke of the foot. But so many wrecks took place among their shoals, that the Spaniards of old named them Devils Isles, and Joe knew by tradition the strange story regarding a mighty multitude of rats, that came, no one knew from where, and, multiplying exceedingly, swarmed over all the isles, and ate up the corn, the fruit, and all green things for a period of five years, after which came a cloud of ravens out of the sky and destroyed them in turn, since when no raven has been seen in the Bermudas.* * This story is told in the _Atlas Geographus_, 1717, vol. v. Derval saw whales trapped and harpooned among the coral reefs, while the very sharks contended with the natives for the blubber in the warm shoal water, and more than once he had climbed Tibbs Hill, the highest elevation there, only a hundred and eighty feet in altitude; and he had seen the gangs of natives toiling at the cisterns in which rain-water is preserved for the shipping, for there are few wells and no fresh-water streams, but the dew-point ranges very high indeed. One day, in his rambles, Derval came upon a little spot of remarkable beauty near the sea-shore. Many caverns, the roofs of which sparkle with brilliant spars, and having fantastic stalactites formed of the dripping water--genuine coral caverns, beautiful as the transformation scene in a pantomime, with their reflected lights, colours, shadows and uncertainties--are to be found in many parts of these isles, having in them pools of cool water delicious to bathe in. Through one of these from the sea-shore--one in which it is said the poet Waller wrote a portion of his poetical description of Bermuda, when in exile there he penned his insipid "Battle of the Summer Isles,"--Derval wandered to where its inner end opened on a beautiful little dell, an amphitheatre of coral cliffs and verdure, at the bottom of which lay a salt pool filled always by the sea at each flood tide, and therein he was certain that more than once he saw a stealthy shark gliding.