man said was the end of the cavern, and finding it so, I felt there was nothing to recompense one for the fatigue of a walk of ten miles, and the scramble over the rocks in the passage. During our course through the stream, as well as in the many large holes filled with water, I had in vain looked for the proteus, which however the old man assured me had been found by the peasants in the stream during its course through the cavern, and that it had also been cast up by it, when swelled by rain, near Laas, a small town about five miles distant, where this subterraneous stream again appears upon the surface. Quitting the cavern, I returned to Zirknitz, which I reached late in the afternoon, with a very good appetite, for all that we had partaken of since an early breakfast, was a few smoked pears and a pint of wine, sourer than the sourest vinegar, which, with a bit of black bread, were the only eatables afforded by one of the village inns of the banks of the lake of Zirknitz. Sir Humphry had returned from his pursuit of the mountain partridge, nearly as fatigued and dissatisfied with his ill-success as I was with mine, and he determined upon returning to Laibach to-morrow. _16th-30th._ Quitting Zirknitz, and driving through Planina and Ober-Laibach, we returned to Laibach, where we remained in our old quarters till the 30th. Sir Humphry, as usual, occupying the day in shooting or fishing, and now and then in completing his experiments on the torpedo, by comparing the results of the electricity of this fish with the effects produced by a very small voltaic pile. He found them to be essentially different in their action, and summed up the whole series of his experiments and observations in a long letter to the Royal Society.[G] He has at last met with a pair of carriage horses that please him, and has bought them for four hundred florins (40_l._), so that he now intends travelling with his own four horses. The weather has been getting colder and colder, but I think that nothing less than the sight of the snow that fell to-day (30th) would have determined his departure, which is now fixed for to-morrow, when we start for Italy and Rome. _31st._ We have at last quitted Laibach, and I never recollect having left any place, not even the most wretched village, with the joy and delight I experienced on quitting Detella's inn, which has so long been for me an abode of listlessness and ennui. We slept this night at Planina, in the same bad inn which we stopped at on our trip to Trieste.