he fled with his beloved to the Feejee Islands, and on his returning to his native home after the death of the tyrant, his countrymen heard with astonishment of the wonderful asylum that had been revealed to him by the beneficent sea-gods. Lord Byron adopted this graceful tale as the subject of his poem "The Island, or Christian and his Comrades," and has thus described the cave, no doubt largely adorning it from the stores of his brilliant fancy: "Around she pointed to a spacious cave, Whose only portal was the keyless wave (A hollow archway, by the sun unseen, Save through the billows' glassy veil of green, On some transparent ocean holiday, When all the finny people are at play). "Wide it was and high; And showed a self-born Gothic canopy. The arch upreared by Nature's architect, The architrave some earthquake might erect; The buttress from some mountain's bosom hurl'd, When the poles crash'd and water was the world; Or harden'd from some earth-absorbing fire, While yet the globe reek'd from its funeral pyre. The fretted pinnacle, the aisle, the nave, Were there, all scoop'd by darkness from her cave. There, with a little tinge of fantasy, Fantastic faces mopp'd and mow'd on high; And then a mitre or a shrine would fix The eye upon its seeming crucifix. Thus Nature played with the stalactites, And built herself a chapel of the seas." [Footnote E: A favourite pastime of the Polynesian chiefs.] [Footnote F: An intoxicating beverage extracted from the Piper methysticum, a species of pepper plant.] On many rocky shores the ocean has worn out subterraneous channels in the cliffs against which it has been beating for ages, and then frequently emerges in water-spouts or fountains from the opposite end. Thus, in the Skerries, one of the Shetland Islands, a deep chasm or inlet, which is open overhead, is continued under ground and then again opens to the sky in the middle of the island. When the water is high, the waves rise up through this aperture like the blowing of a whale in noise and appearance.