no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles were, however, delighted with the commission--it was all for the benefit of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them--a very happy boy--armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George. I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior--as is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated--to a cave almost entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the east; and yet even _it_ had its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the semicircle project on either side into deep water--into at least water so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in each of these bold promontories--the terminal horns of the crescent--there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small perforations--the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise--that open externally among the cliffs above; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in