when set, would have a curiously lofty hoist for a vessel of her size. Such as she was, there she was, all of the olden time, spinning through the blue marrow of the Channel, and making for some far western port.

All on the left of the young lady rose a towering terrace of cliff, white and gray blocks, seared, ravaged, scowling, menacing the up-looker with the headlong threat of its topmost reefs. It went for miles. At some distance its curvature frames what is now a well-known watering-place.

The narrative must stop an instant to describe the young lady. Who is this girl that is walking solitary along the sands under a great height of cliff before the midday dinner-hour? She shall be introduced at once as Ada Conway, the daughter of Commander Conway, R.N., a gentleman of spirit, who had seen service, who lived in a comfortable little house out of eyeshot of the wash of ebb-tide. She was a tall girl, above the middle stature, of mould in absolute proportion. She had thick black hair. She was Eastern in her colour and eyes, yet had as fine a type of English face as you could wish to see. She was dressed somewhat quaintly in a sort of turban hat, with a short ornament of feather or bird's wing buckled to it by a fal-lal in gold. Her dress was of green material, and was cut so short-waisted as to reach nearly under her arms, where it was clasped in a girdle. This early century beauty blew along athwart the shrill gale and over the ribbed brown sand. And sometimes she looked at the leaning barque, and sometimes she stopped in earnest to take in the whole sumptuous mass of mountainous breaker, lifting into Atlantic height, before falling with the dead crash of the defeated billow.

Suddenly her ear was caught by a sound proceeding from the direction of the cliff. It did not come from the base; it did not come from the summit; but, womanlike, she must needs look along both. She was passing on, when the same strange, alarming cry stopped her, and now she had the good sense to scan the front of the cliff, where might-be she should see a man hanging by his eyelids to the edge of a rock, or some helpless boy in a hollow, lowered thence by a bowline, and lost to recovery by his friends.

The terrace of cliff was a vast expanse of holes and fissures—great crevices of the size of gaps; it buttressed out in parts with natural effect, was solid and green at its base, and was a noble example of an English seaboard. Miss Conway directed her eyes over the face of the cliff very carefully, studiously, as of purpose, under her shaded hand, missing the hole from which the voice was proceeding. She then, with a start, beheld a part of the figure of a man standing in a hollow of the cliff, well known to her, as a young lady residing in those parts, as the orifice of a smuggler's tunnel called the Devil's Walk.

She saw him wave a handkerchief. She pulled out hers and waved it in return, running a little way towards the base of the cliff, and shrieking—

'I know where you have got fixed. I will release you!'

The wind carried her high and powerful notes. The man in the hole flourished his arm with the most cordial, grateful gesticulation, and the young lady walked swiftly towards the little town which lay in an embrasure in the great cliff on her right.

The road was steep, wide, and formed an angle. It went like a steeple into the sky. People often paused to admire the gulls floating round about and in and out the liquid blue of this fanciful aerial spire. Nothing of the town was visible till almost the summit of the great gap had been reached, when there began to steal upon the sight a row of little houses built of flint, further off a church, then again a pleasant little rectory-house. Houses broke the landscape, which had few trees, and was hilly only in the distance. It was a sort of town that seemed to have settled down to nothing and to seem nothing. It gave itself no airs; all was chaste and sober—of a Quaker-like trimness of aspect. In a small garden, distant by about a mile from the bulk of the town, stood a cottage of two stories, square and strong for the gales. It was Commander Conway's home, and the home of his daughter Ada. The girl went swiftly along the edge of the cliff, this time towards the right. She had come about a mile along the sands; she had now to retrace her steps on top. It was not very strange that she should know exactly where the man was imprisoned. She had lived many years in those parts, and knew most of the traditions of the smugglers, and had grown acquainted with their haunts, and had visited them, through talking with old sailors to whom times were always hard. How distant the rolling blue sea seemed all that way off! A full-rigged ship was then in sight, looking close in; she rolled in the noblest majesty the deep can clothe her toys with.

But Ada had no eyes for pictures of the sea or sky, for processions of clouds, nor ear for the gull screeching in its soft white plenty midway high, nor for the breaker arching like glass to the sand. Not just then, anyhow. She struck a path, and walked with vigour about a mile, deviating into a part of the land, about a third of a mile from the brink of the cliff.

She arrived at a strange old enclosure. It might have been some ancient smuggler's vault, the memorial gone, nothing but the flat tombstone and the square of broken neglected railings left. She squeezed through these broken railings, and approached the small flat stone, which was fitted with a ring in the middle; but this she had known for years. Not a living creature was in sight, not even a goat. That vast down of cliff swelled its rampart without visible figure of man to the distant hills.

It seemed a desolate scene even now. One might figure it with some sense of horror in a gale of wind black with snow, so dark that if you did not mind, the next step might carry you into the scaling hiss that was washing, bubbling, fretting, trumpeting into breakers just below.

Miss Conway seized the ring and raised it, not without exerting considerable strength. She had often raised that stone cover, and now, when she had got it off, she knew what to do. It was, in short, the entrance to a smuggler's passage, designed for the lifting of goods from a height. It had been abandoned, not, however, before it had been formed, nor before a whole wheel of like corridors had radiated out of this mainspring under the earth. All were of no use, and had been deserted by the smugglers as worthless. Few took much trouble to wander in those cold caves. They felt tolerably certain that bold Bill and Harry Spikem had not left anything worth their acceptance in those gloomy depths. Boatmen offered to conduct visitors through them for sixpence; but a visitor was an extremely rare bird at a town where there were no lodgings to be had, and but two small inns of those old days for the traveller to put up at—inns such as Nelson sat in with Collingwood and his wife in a little room, whilst little Miss Collingwood watched the dog playing.

The stone being lifted, Miss Conway peered down and called. She peered down and shrieked. The echoes of her voice seemed to flash like light, so piercing were her tones. But under earth the voice is very deceptive, as you shall know if you hail a man from a depth of soil.

Why couldn't he have come to the place where he entered? she thought; and then she reflected that he might have strayed in one of the corridors, and have got to the end of it, and was there standing, thinking the entrance was over his head, and waiting with a beating heart for his release. For certain it was there was no release