On the face of the cliff yawn two deep and dark caverns, to reach which at low water a ledge of rudest steps has been cut diagonally on the perpendicular face of the rock. The descent by this rock-ladder is no puerile feat. We are halfway down, and are checked by a block having fallen from the ledge. There was no turning, so there we lay on the side looking down over the perpendicular 200 feet on the black rocks in the cave. To fall or not to fall, that was the question: if we condescended to drop, that is, to descend rapidly, in obedience to the primal law of gravitation, a fracture of limb or neck was a certainty, and yet we deemed an ascent an impossibility; so as a _dernier ressort_, or rather a forlorn hope, we turned on the back, worked upwards half on and half off the cliff, when happily a wider ledge _by six inches_ enabled us to turn, and then we stood erect in proud triumph, crowing like a bantam at our really _narrow_ escape, and looked gratefully down on the frowning rocks thus cheated of “an awful catastrophe.” There is a grey kite, too, hovering noiselessly over our head. We wave him off majestically—we are not to be the prey of gleds and corbies be sure on’t. Silence reigns around, a calm between the storms, save when the sea-bird flutters screaming along, or the beetle wheels around us his droning flight. But, hark! again—thunder is growling like a jealous gnome at our escape and our exalted enjoyment. Twice, indeed, we essayed to leave this accomplished spot, and lingered until the broad evening shadows began to deepen even the gloom of the storm-cloud, and we descend by two dismantled forts, their guns lying rusted on the turf. _Les Pierres du lacq_—_the Paternosters_—high above water on our ascent, are now lost in the deep. The tempest was raging as we were driving down a wooded dingle. A flash and a crash in quick succession—the lightning has struck the rock: a huge block, several tons in weight, rolls thundering down the precipice, crushing trees to atoms in its downward course. The driver of our carriage is scared from under the boughs and dashes down the valley like a madman. Poor fellow, he was neither a Franklin nor a Faraday; and not reflecting that the storm-cloud travels swiftly, he did not know that this very dingle was now the safest place in Jersey. The villes of St. Mary and St. John are near us; their churches of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. In St. John’s, on its saint’s eve, was once celebrated in all its degraded perfection of orchard-robbing, cow-milking, &c., the wild marauding game of _Faire brave les Poeles_, a stain on the sporting annals of Jersey. It is now, we hope and believe, nearly obsolete.