In scrambling back along the ledge in the big cavity I gave the final shove to a dangerous loose rock weighing something like six hundredweight. It fell into the ravine beneath, and hurtled onwards toward the chain of potholes, making the whole grim place ring with a crash of echoes. It took us two hours and a half to return to the cave mouth, although we were unencumbered with apparatus, for we had left the ropes and pulleys in place for another descent. Getting seven men up the higher of the two vertical pitches was a tough undertaking at the end of an arduous day, and when we returned through the famous S tunnel more than one explorer seemed disposed to snatch a sleep on its procrustean bed. We had been twelve hours underground when we revisited the glimpses of the moon. It had been proposed to continue the exploration next day, but no one was fit for such a repetition of exhausting labours. The day following, a party of three was mustered to recover the apparatus that had been left in the depths. Two of us reached the head of the nethermost pitch, and after hours of severe work got everything up to the mouth of the swallet. Once more we drove back over Mendip in the dark. All around us on the desolate plateau was impenetrable gloom, but in the northern sky, and it seemed but a few miles away, the lights of Bath and Bristol flared across the heavens like two immense conflagrations. Never does one feel the sublimity of the open, windy earth, the starry sky, and the free sense of space, so profoundly as after striving for a long day to break through the barriers that shut us out from the regions of mystery under the hills. E. A. B. SWILDON'S HOLE