My amusements had undergone very little change: I was even fonder of the shores and woods than ever, and better acquainted with the rocks and caves. A very considerable change, however, had taken place in the amusements of the school-fellows my contemporaries, who were now from two to three years older than when I had been associated with them in the parish school. Hy-spy had lost its charms; nor was there much of its old interest for them in French and English; whereas my rock excursions they came to regard as very interesting indeed. With the exception of my friend of the cave, they cared little about rocks or stones; but they all liked brambles, and sloes, and _craws-apples_, tolerably well, and took great delight in assisting me to kindle fires in the caverns of the old-coast line, at which we used to broil shell-fish and crabs, taken among the crags and boulders of the ebb below, and roast potatoes, transferred from the fields of the hill above. There was one cave, an especial favourite with us, in which our fires used to blaze day after day for weeks together. It is deeply hollowed in the base of a steep ivy-mantled precipice of granitic gneiss, a full hundred feet in height; and bears on its smoothed sides and roof, and along its uneven bottom,--fretted into pot-like cavities, with large rounded pebbles in them,--unequivocal evidence that the excavating agent to which it owed its existence had been the wild surf of this exposed shore. But for more than two thousand years wave had never reached it: the last general elevation of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest stream-tides; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight recesses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts; and a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had never looked in his strength, sprang thickly up over its floor. In the remote past it had been used as a sort of garner and thrashing-place by a farmer of the parish, named Marcus, who had succeeded in rearing crops of bere and oats on two sloping plots at the foot of the cliffs in its immediate neighbourhood; and it was known, from this circumstance, to my uncles and the older inhabitants of the town, as Marcus's Cave. My companions, however, had been chiefly drawn to it by a much more recent association. A poor Highland pensioner--a sorely dilapidated relic of the French-American War, who had fought under General Wolfe in his day--had taken a great fancy to the cave, and would fain have made it his home. He was ill at ease in his family;--his wife was a termagant, and his daughter disreputable; and, desirous to quit their society altogether, and live as a hermit among the rocks, he had made application to the gentleman who tenanted the farm above, to be permitted to fit up the cave for himself as a dwelling. So bad was his English, however, that the gentleman failed to understand him; and his