y
that, when they went to bed, it was long before they slept, and then
their brains were busy with strange dreams, in which one was fighting
for his life against a host of well-armed men, the victor taking a
vessel with the treasure of valuable silks and spices, and making his
parents rich people to the last.

But an idea was dominant with both when they woke, soon after sunrise.
They must go back to the cavern soon, and probe the mystery to the very
end.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

DAYGO DESCRIBES HORRORS.

"Er-her! Going to school! Yer!"

Vince, who had some books under his arm, felt a peculiar twitching in
the nerves, as he turned sharply upon the heavy-looking lad who had
spoken the above words, with the prologue and epilogue formed of jeering
laughs, which sounded something like the combinations placed there to
represent them.

The speaker was the son of the Jemmy Carnach who was, as the Doctor
said, a martyr to indigestion--a refined way of expressing his intense
devotion to lobsters, the red armour of which molluscs could be seen
scattered in every direction about his cottage door, and at the foot of
the cliff beyond.

As Jemmy Carnach had thought proper to keep up family names in
old-fashioned style, he had had his son christened James, like his
father, grandfather and great-grandfather--which was as far as Carnach
could trace. The result was a little confusing, the Crag island not
being big enough for two Jemmy Carnachs. The fishermen, however, got
over the difficulty by always calling the father Jemmy and his son Young
'un; but this did not suit Vince and Mike, with whom there had always
been a feud, the fisherman's lad having constantly displayed an intense
hatred, in his plebeian way, for the young representatives of the
patricians on the isle. The manners in which he had shown this, from
very early times, were many; and had taken the forms of watching till
the companions were below cliffs, and then stealing to the top and
dislodging stones, that they might roll down upon their heads; filling
his pockets with the thin, sharply ground, flat oyster-shells to be
found among the beach pebbles--a peculiarly cutting kind of weapon--and
at every opportunity sending them skimming at one or other of the lads;
making holes in their boat, when they had one--being strongly suspected
of cutting two adrift, so that they were swept away, and never heard of
again; and in divers other ways showing his dislike or h