ht, you know; there
would have been no waves, but there might have been a high tide. There
must have been tremendously high tides down there at one time, so as to
have washed out those caves."

"Ah! it's a precious long time since they've been washed out, I know,"
said Mike, laughing. "They don't ever get swept out now."

"No, but they're kept neat, with sand on the floor," said Vince,
snapping to the door of the lanthorn and holding it up for the soft
yellow light to shine upon the granite walls. "I say, Mike, don't you
think we're a pair of old stupids to make all this fuss over a hole in
the ground?"

"No: why should we be?"

"Because it doesn't seem any good. Here we take all this trouble hiding
away and going down the hole like worms, so as to crawl about there in
the sand."

"And what about the beautiful caves, and the rocks where we sit and
watch the sea-birds?"

"We could see them just as well off the cliffs."

"But the cove with the great walls of rock all round, and the current
racing round like a whirlpool?"

"Plenty of currents and eddies anywhere off the coast."

"But the fishing?"

"We could fish in easier places," said Vince, talking loudly now they
were well down in the passage. "Why, we've had better luck everywhere
than here."

"Oh, you are a discontented chap!" said Mike. "You ought to think
yourself wonderfully well off, to be able to come down to such a place.
See what jolly feasts we've had down here all alone."

"Yes, but it seems to me sometimes like nonsense to be cooking potatoes
and frying fish down in a cave, when we could sit comfortably at a table
at your house or ours, and have no trouble at all."

"Well, you are a fellow!" cried Mike. "You said one day that the fish
we cooked down there tasted twice as good as it did at home."

"Yes, I did one day when we hadn't got it smoky."

"We don't often get it smoky," protested Mike. "But I say, don't talk
like that. You were as eager to make our little secret place there as I
was. You don't mean to say you're getting tired of it?"

"I don't know," said Vince. "Yes, I do. No, I'm not getting tired of
it yet, for it does seem very jolly, as you say, when we do get down
here all alone, and feel as if we were thousands of miles from
everywhere. But I shall get tired of it some day. I don't think it's
half so good since we found the way into the other cave."

"I do," said Mike. "It's splendid to have made such a dis