Returning to the open air, we ascended to the cliff top, and, skirting each promontory and rounding the edge of every bay, proceeded towards the mouth of the defile on the lookout for openings. Not far from the highest point we had noticed from the road a series of dark cavities. One man scrambled along a ledge to the uppermost of these, and found that it was merely a shallow niche, and another, on a ledge some 50 feet lower, proved to be only 20 feet deep. He made a determined effort to reach another fissure on the same level as the last but sundered from it by a wide space of cliff which was covered with dense brambles. Holding on to the prickly stems, and fighting his way through, he got near enough to see into the fissure, but was quite unable to enter it for a closer examination. An opening in the cliffs at a lower point, but still some 200 feet above the road, led a long way into the recesses of the Limestone strata, making two wide curves to the right, but maintaining a generally easterly direction. The passages were very low, narrow, and awkwardly shaped, involving a great deal of unpleasant crawling; and when we reached the stalagmite grotto at the end we found that it had been pillaged of every bit of calcite that could be removed. This cavern, the "Long Hole," must have been the channel of a stream that once flowed from somewhere on the other side of the gorge, through the mass of rock that has now been swept away by the forces of disintegration. Though several hundred feet long, it is but the tail end of the cavern that once existed. The remainder of our time was devoted to two of the Burrington caverns, on the opposite side of the Mendip Hills, and to a fruitless search for a large chasm or swallet hole into which the drainage from the now abandoned lead mines on the top of Mendip used to fall and ultimately find its way to Cheddar, where it poisoned the trout stream. A score or more of years ago I saw these mines, still in working order; but now the dried-up pools and the wilderness of refuse, with fragments of ruined buildings, look as old almost as the remains of the Roman mines. Of the important opening that we sought there is now no trace; it may have been filled up intentionally and the stream allowed to revert to its old channel, whence it had been turned artificially. Hard by, in the Long Wood near Charterhouse, and elsewhere, there are smaller swallets that we were already acquainted with; and there are others at Priddy, the waters of which find an exit farther to the east. The ground we were on is well known to readers of Walter Raymond's romances, and we were much interested when it was pointed out that the lonely house facing us was the actual Ubley Farm that figures in _Two Men o' Mendip_. E. A. B. THE BURRINGTON CAVERNS