l height, and knowing that the
water was low, owing to its being the very end of the dry season, he had
expected to be killed by being dashed against the rocks below the
surface; fortunately for him, however, that portion of the chasm which
he had selected for his awful leap, chanced to overhang a deep still
pool, into which Grenville had dropped, and from which he had emerged
almost unharmed; but, being immediately carried away by the river, he
had, in the darkness, received several nasty knocks which almost
deprived him of his senses. When he had been in the water for upwards
of an hour, silently floating along with the stream, as he could nowhere
find foothold upon the slippery sides of the cliff, our hero detected
the current quickening; soon the stream grew faster and noisier, and all
at once he noticed that he was no longer able to see the sky above, but
_was drifting along underground_. In the awful horror of that moment
Grenville almost went mad. He commenced a mighty and useless struggle
against the resistless current, but found himself borne along like a
feather.

Just, however, as he was losing hope, he struck first his foot, and then
his knee, against something hard, and dropping into an upright posture
found that he had been, all the time, attempting to swim in less than
three feet of water, which just here ran like a mill-race.

Groping about, our friend at last succeeded in getting on a rock half
out of the water, and hung there for hours, with his person benumbed
from head to foot, and his senses paralysed. "He had," he said, "come
to the conclusion that nothing could be worse than his present position,
and that he might as well drift wherever the stream chose to take him,"
when all at once he noticed the dark, swift waters changing colour, and
with a cry of joy recognised the fact that instead of being absolutely
underground, he was only shut in by immense cliffs, thickly wooded to
their very summits, and which all but entirely excluded the glad light
of day; and day it was, the sun was up, and soon sent his welcome shafts
of light streaming through the interlaced branches overhead, lighting
the gloomy chasm in dim and ghostly fashion.

Pulling himself together, Grenville slipped back into the water, and,
plucky fellow that he was, waded down the stream for about two hours,
"having," he said, "a hazy notion that he was doing the right thing by
instinct."

At the end of this time he entered a tun