t enabled me to get across to Herm before they set their patrol
boats--and very briefly of what had passed and was toward, and so left him,
content and cheerful.

My mother would have added to our supplies, but we had as much as we could
carry, and enough, we thought, for the term of our probable imprisonment.
So we bade her farewell, and went on across the fields, past La Moinerie
towards the Eperquerie.

"We are going to the Boutiques," I said.

"My Boutiques," said Uncle George, with a laugh. And, instead of going on
to that dark chasm whose steep black walls and upstanding boulders lead one
precariously into the caves with which we were familiar, he turned aside to
another narrower gash in the tumbled rocks, and we stood on the brink
wondering where he would take us. For, well as we knew the nooks and
crannies thereabouts, we had never found entrance here.

We stood looking down into the narrow chasm. The tide was still churning
among its slabs and boulders, and the inner end showed no opening into the
cliff, nothing but piles of rounded pebbles and stranded tangles of vraic.
We thought he had made a mistake.

But he looked quietly down into the boiling pot below, and said, "We have
still an hour to wait. The tide is higher than I thought." So we sat on the
short salt turf and waited.

"Tiens!" said Carette, pointing suddenly. And looking, we saw three boats
pull out from the channel between Herm and Jethou. One came past us towards
the north-east, and Uncle George made us lie flat behind gorse cushions
till it was out of sight round Bec du Nez, though by crawling a little way
up the head we could see it lying watchfully about a mile away. Another
went off round Little Sercq to stop any communication with Jersey. The
third lay in the way between Sercq and Peter Port.

"M. Torode shuts the doors," said my grandfather tersely. "B'en! we will
try in the dark."

Between the softness of the turf and the heat of the sun and my great
weariness, I was just on the point of falling asleep, when Uncle George
came back from a look at his cleft, and picked up his loads, and said,
"Come!" and five minutes later we were standing behind him in the salt
coolness of the little black chasm, among the slabs and boulders and the
fresh sea pools. And still we saw no entrance.

But he went to the inner side of a great slab that lay wedged against the
wall of the chasm, and, stooping there, dragged out rock after rock,
cunningly