it, so that I could look all round it. It was not a very large room (I suppose it was fifteen feet square) and it looked rather smaller than it was, because it was heaped almost to the roof in one or two places with boxes and kegs, and the various sea-stores, such as new rope and spare anchors. In one corner of it (in the corner at which I entered it) a flight of worn stone steps led downwards into the bowels of the earth. "Aha!" I thought; "so that's how you reach your harbour!" Then I crept up to one of the piles of boxes and cautiously peeped over. I looked over cautiously, for as I entered the room I had the eerie feeling which one gets sometimes at night; I felt that there was somebody else in the room. Sure enough there was somebody else--two somebodies--and my heart leaped up in joy to see them. Sitting on the ground, tied by the body to some of the boxes over which I peered, were the two missing coastguards. Their backs were towards me, and their hands and feet were securely bound; but they were unhurt, that was the great thing. One of them was quietly smoking, filling the cave with strong tobacco smoke; the other was asleep, breathing rather heavily. It was evidently a pleasant holiday for the pair of them. No other person was in the room, but I saw that on the far side of the chamber another gallery led on into the cliff to another chamber, and from this chamber came the sound of many voices talking (in a dull quiet way), and the slow droning of the song of a drunken man. I shut my eyes, and lay across the boxes as still as a dead man, trying to summon up enough courage to speak to the coastguard; and all the time the drunkard's song quavered and shook, and died down, and dragged on again, as though it would never end. Afterwards I often heard that song, in all its thirty stanzas; and I have only to repeat a line of it to bring back to myself the scene of the sunny cave, with the bound coastguard smoking, and the smugglers talking and talking just a few paces out of sight. "And the gale it roar-ed dismally As we went to New Barbary," said the singer; and then some one asked a question, and some one struck a light for his pipe, and the singer droned on and on about the bold Captain Glen, and the ship which met with such disaster. At last I summoned up enough courage to speak. I crawled over the boxes as far as I could, and touched the coastguard. "Sh!" I said, in a low voice, "Don't make a sound. I've come to rescue you." The man stared violently (I dare say his nerves were in a bad way after his night in the cave), he dropped his pipe with a little clatter on the stones, and turned to stare at me. "Sh!" I said again. "Don't speak. Don't make a sound." I crept round the boxes to him, and opened my knife. It was a strong knife, with very sharp blades (Marah used to whet them for me), so that it did not take me long to cut through the "inch-and-a-half-rope," which lashed the poor fellow to the boxes.