which they had slain; for the hides crept and quivered as though still the life were in them, and the flesh moaned as with the moan of cattle, while the red flame curled up round it. For six days they feasted on the shore, and on the seventh day the wind went down, and the sea was still. Then they dragged the ship down to the water, and sailed away from the land; but when they had gone far, so that they could see only the heaven above and the wide sea around them, then the dark cloud came down again, and Zeus bade the whirlwind strike the ship of Odysseus. High rose the angry waves, and the fierce lightnings flashed from the thick cloud. Louder and louder shrieked the storm, till the ropes of the mast and sail snapped like slender twigs, and the mast fell with a mighty crash, and smote down the helmsman, so that he sank dead beneath the weight. Then the ship lay helpless on the waters, and the waves burst over her in their fury until all the men were swept off into the sea, and Odysseus only was left. The west wind carried the battered wreck at random over the waters, and when its fury was stilled, the south wind came and drove Odysseus, as he clung to the mast, near to the whirlpool of Charybdis and the caves of the greedy Skylla. For nine days and nights he lay tossed on the stormy water till his limbs were numbed with cold, and he felt that he must die; but on the tenth day he was cast upon the shore, and so he reached the island where dwelt the Lady Calypso. THE NEW YEAR. 1. Ring out wild bells to the wild sky, 2. Ring out the old, ring in the new ; The year is going, let him go- 3. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 4. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and rightRing in the common love of good. 5. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; 6. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand : Ring out the darkness of the land; Ring in the Christ that is to be. A BOY'S ADVENTURES AMONG THE SEA-CAVES. A TALE OF THE CROMARTY COAST. It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the caves so near. The tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood the philosophy of neap-tides at that period. I was quite sure I had got round at low water with my uncles not a great many days before, and we both inferred that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside, until such time as the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance of the naked feet, it is just possible to creep. We succeeded in scrambling up to it, and then, crawling outwards on all-fours-the precipice, as we proceeded, beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below we reached the outer point of the promontory; and then, doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin-the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower and less green as we advanced inwards—we A found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success-up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell, and for at least the whole coming week, though we were unaware of the extent of our good-luck at the time, the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days, to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle, they were our own and no other man's.' The first ten hours were hours of sheer enjoyment. The larger cave proved a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves by creeping, dwarf-bushes, that told of the blighting influences of the sea-spray, the pale yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before save in gardens and shrubberies, and on a deeply-shaded slope that leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the sweet-scented woodroof of the flower-plot and parterre, with its delicate white flowers and pretty verticillate leaves, that become the more odoriferous the more they are crushed. There, too, immediately in the opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in detached drops from the overbeetling precipice above, like the first drops of a heavy thundershower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy-grass, with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook used in his voyages; above all, there were the caves with their pigeons, white, variegated, and blue, and their mysterious and gloomy depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In a short time we had broken off with our hammers whole pocketfuls of stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of the cave, where we could see the work of congealation going on, as at the commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind but barely ruffles the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish moorland stream, and shews the newly-formed needles of ice glistening from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them; the springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges, and the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while all around was dark as midnight-the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine-the black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin; even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce visible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light-all acquired a new interest from the peculiarity of the setting in which we saw them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet; and it was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, however, and perhaps somewhat supernatural to boot, that about an hour after noon, the tide, while yet there was a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the promontory, ceased to fall, H |