substance were different from those of the other rocks which lay
scattered around. His voluntary walks, it will readily be
believed, had never led to this spot; so that, finding himself now
there for the first time after the terrible catastrophe, the scene
at once recurred to his mind with all its accompaniments of
horror. He remembered how, like a guilty thing, gliding from the
neighbouring place of concealment, he had mingled with eagerness,
yet with caution, among the terrified group who surrounded the
corpse, dreading lest any one should ask from whence he came. He
remembered, too, with what conscious fear he had avoided gazing
upon that ghastly spectacle. The wild scream of his patron, 'My
bairn! my bairn!' again rang in his ears. 'Good God!' he
exclaimed, 'and is all I have gained worth the agony of that
moment, and the thousand anxious fears and horrors which have
since embittered my life! O how I wish that I lay where that
wretched man lies, and that he stood here in life and health! But
these regrets are all too late.'

Stifling, therefore, his feelings, he crept forward to the cave,
which was so near the spot where the body was found that the
smugglers might have heard from their hiding-place the various
conjectures of the bystanders concerning the fate of their victim.
But nothing could be more completely concealed than the entrance
to their asylum. The opening, not larger than that of a fox-earth,
lay in the face of the cliff directly behind a large black rock,
or rather upright stone, which served at once to conceal it from
strangers and as a mark to point out its situation to those who
used it as a place of retreat. The space between the stone and the
cliff was exceedingly narrow, and, being heaped with sand and
other rubbish, the most minute search would not have discovered