But there are still remains discovered which recall Pengelly’s description of the cave being tenanted at the same period both by men and wild animals; the cave-men going forth to fish or hunt and the hyænas looking in during their absence for anything worth picking up. And there are things belonging to remote geological periods which are of those discoveries that first upset the chronology of the Book of Genesis and gave staggering shocks to believers in the absolute literal accuracy of the Bible: teeth of wild animals, not merely in the deposits of the floor, but embedded in the limestone rock overhead. Who shall put a date to these? And here, at our elbow all the while, is the guide, complacently pointing to all these things; lighting flares which disclose the roof, and playing scales with sticks on metallic-sounding stalactites that have been forming with incredible slowness, perhaps an inch in a thousand years, just to be made a show of. The best of all the stalactites is broken. It began to be formed when the world was young. It grew and grew with the drops of water, charged with lime, percolating from the roof, and being met by its fellow stalagmite with equal slowness rising from the floor. And stalactite and stalagmite had nearly met, and only wanted another three or four centuries to bridge the remaining interval of an eighth of an inch, when a visitor, falling accidentally against them, broke them off! “What did you say?” one, with pardonable curiosity, asks the guide, and “What _could_ you say?” says he; and when you consider it, _what_ is there that would be equal to that tremendous occasion? [Illustration: _The_ SOUTH DEVON COAST TORQUAY _to_ PLYMOUTH _and the_ TAMAR] CHAPTER XV ILSHAM GRANGE—MEADFOOT—TORQUAY In this quiet and wooded nook near Kent’s Cavern, tucked away from the octopus arms of Torquay, is Ilsham Grange, a chance survival of those old times when Tor Abbey ruled the roast in these parts. Everything here was then agricultural. Not even a village, only the monks’ farm, relieved the solitude. Traces of those old farmers remain in the grey turret in the farmyard, where the pigeons flutter and the pigs grunt contentedly, blissfully unconscious of what pork, ham, and bacon mean. In this turret, now with the floors gone, Brother this, that, or t’other, sent over from the Abbey round the headland, lodged, and ruled from it the _conversi_, or lay-brothers, whose business it was to conduct the practical farming and to be as the Children of Gibeon, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the community.