At Bridgewater, where we had arrived one winter morning at sunrise, after a melancholious journey in unwarmed carriages across the flooded moors beyond Glastonbury, not a person had heard tell of a cave in the Quantocks. But the information we relied on, though a century old, was definite enough to warrant the hire of a trap to convey us and our apparatus to a certain lonely cross-road, seven miles away, in a corner of the broad parish of Bloomfield. Climbing steadily through Enmore, we found the cross-road on a hilltop 800 feet above the sea, hard by a homely tavern, where we got cider for ourselves and feed for the horse. To our west was the Beacon on Cotherstone Hill, and two miles farther the Fire Signal Pits on Will's Neck (1261 feet), the highest of the Quantock Hills. But of the red-deer country that lay around us we saw little, and less as the day wore on, for a cold sea-mist came rolling up from the Bristol Channel, and would have given us trouble in finding our cave, had not a guide appeared providentially. It was a tattered and weather-beaten countryman, who emerged from the tap-room and announced that he was the only person who knew anything about the cave. He dilated in glowing terms on its beauties--"It be very ornamental, sur, very ornamental." Fox by name and fox by nature, so he described himself--for he was both garrulous and egotistical--he was fond of burrowing into holes. That he was a poacher to boot, we had no reason to disbelieve after a few minutes' conversation. He led us by a veritable fox's path over fields and hedges, through a mist-drenched spinney, down to a dingle, where beetle-browed rocks overhung the entrance to the cave. A rusty iron gate barred the way, and was padlocked. Reynard proposed to make a journey of several miles, at our expense, to procure the key; but a broken link in the chain saved us time and cider.