ce of the past, that I was destined to be a scholar. And,
invariably fortunate in my opportunities of amusement, the transference
took place only a few weeks ere the better schoolmaster, losing health
and heart in a labyrinth of perplexity resigned his charge. I had
little more than time enough to look about me on the new forms, and to
renew, on a firmer foundation than ever, my friendship with my old
associate of the cave--who had been for the two previous years an inmate
of the subscription school, and was now less under maternal control than
before--when on came the long vacation; and for four happy months I had
nothing to do.

My amusements had undergone very little change: I was even fonder of the
shores and woods than ever, and better acquainted with the rocks and
caves. A very considerable change, however, had taken place in the
amusements of the school-fellows my contemporaries, who were now from
two to three years older than when I had been associated with them in
the parish school. Hy-spy had lost its charms; nor was there much of its
old interest for them in French and English; whereas my rock excursions
they came to regard as very interesting indeed. With the exception of my
friend of the cave, they cared little about rocks or stones; but they
all liked brambles, and sloes, and _craws-apples_, tolerably well, and
took great delight in assisting me to kindle fires in the caverns of the
old-coast line, at which we used to broil shell-fish and crabs, taken
among the crags and boulders of the ebb below, and roast potatoes,
transferred from the fields of the hill above. There was one cave, an
especial favourite with us, in which our fires used to blaze day after
day for weeks together. It is deeply hollowed in the base of a steep
ivy-mantled precipice of granitic gneiss, a full hundred feet in height;
and bears on its smoothed sides and roof, and along its uneven
bottom,--fretted into pot-like cavities, with large rounded pebbles in
them,--unequivocal evidence that the excavating agent to which it owed
its existence had been the wild surf of this exposed shore. But for more
than two thousand years wave had never reached it: the last general
elevation of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest
stream-tides; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight
recesses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts; and
a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had