Without further pause he turned to ascertain the nature of the place upon which the stairway had debouched. It was a wide and lofty cavern of Nature's fashioning, except that the walls and the natural obstructions of the flooring had been rendered smooth and clear by the hand of man. It was easy to estimate the purposes of this subterranean abode. There was less imagination in the legends of the old mill than he had supposed. If the books of his childish reading had any foundation in their local color this was certainly the den of some old-time smugglers. He passed rapidly along the declining passage, and the end of it came as he expected to find it. It was a cave which opened in the face of the cliff overlooking the cove, but so ingeniously hidden by Nature that its presence could never have been even guessed at by any chance visit from the sea. He stood at the opening and gazed out upon the already twilit cove. But he could not see the sea from where he stood; only along the face of the cliff to his right, down which, zigzagging and winding, a sort of rough-hewn stairway communicated with the beach below. In front of him a great projection of rock, as though riven from the main cliff at some far-off time by the colossal forces of Nature, hid the entire entrance of the cavern. And so narrow was the space intervening that he could touch it with an outstretching of his arm. It was a remarkable hiding-place. Nor did he marvel that he had never heard of it before. But the rapidly deepening twilight of the cove warned him of the approach of the hour of his appointment. So he blew out his lantern and began the descent to the beach nearly fifty feet below. Within five minutes he was standing in the centre of a patch of golden sand with the still ebbing water of the cove lapping gently at his feet. A curious change had come over him. All interest inspired by the journey through the cavern was entirely gone. Even, for the time, he had no longer any thought of the purpose for which he was there. His mind was absorbed in the curious weird of the place, and the dreadful feeling of overwhelming might bearing in and down upon him.