It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that, with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the caves so near. The tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I was quite sure I had got round at low water with my uncles not a great many days before, and we both inferred, that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We succeeded in scrambling up to it; and then, crawling outwards on all fours--the precipice, as we proceeded, beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below--we reached the outer point of the promontory; and then doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin--the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower and less green as we advanced inwards--we found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell; and for at least the whole coming week--though we were unaware of the extent of our good luck at the time--the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days--to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle--"they were our own, and no other man's."