We were given to understand that only two of us at a time could enter the mysterious cave, and that our boat was a great deal too large to pass through that low, dark hole in the rock which the restless blue sea was lapping incessantly with a rapidity of motion that seemed to be momentarily on the increase. We were moreover told that _il vecchio_(48) was inside—a piece of information which, conveying no express ideas to my mind, awoke a vague apprehension that perhaps I might have touched on the abode of the Old Man of the Sea—a prospect not altogether desirable. There was a great question who was to enter the little boat and first encounter the passage and the old man. Ida and Elizabeth refused to be separated, and Mary, with an exclamation—something about being responsible to their mother for their safety—saw them embark with a pang. In an instant, obedient to the sailor lad’s injunctions, they both disappeared, lying flat down at the bottom of the boat. The sailor gave one vigorous stroke of his oar, ducked down himself, and the boat was sucked into the awful cavern between the heaving sea and the low arch. Mary and I sat silent. Of course we knew there was no danger. It was what everybody did, and there could be nothing to apprehend; nevertheless, I am free to acknowledge that those twenty minutes, during which we were as much shut out from all sight and sound of them as if they were gone to the bottom, while the treacherous waves slapped and lapped the rock like some hungry live thing, and in so doing almost closed the orifice through which the boat had disappeared, were not by any means minutes of absolute serenity to our nerves. Presently, however, the prow of the little boat reappeared, and in a second up jumped Ida and Elizabeth like Jack in the box. “Well!” we both exclaimed. “Oh! it is beautiful. Make haste!” “And the old man?” said I dubiously. “Oh! yes, he is there,” was the only reply, and no more satisfactory than my previous information.