When he awoke in the morning, the French captain lay dead at his side. The Russian never forgot this generous act of one whom the policy of his nation had made his enemy.
E. D.
WONDERFUL CAVERNS.
II.—FINGAL'S CAVE, STAFFA.
hile we shall have to consider some of the most wonderful caverns of other lands, we must not forget that Great Britain can boast of perhaps the most beautiful cave in the world. As we are a nation of sailors, it seems fitting that our marvellous cavern should rise directly from the sea, and that its pavement should be the mighty ocean. It is claimed as the most beautiful because it has the advantage of light to exhibit its wonders, as well as the endless variety of the dancing waves to illuminate its dark pillars with a never-ending flash of gems, as the waters dash against its walls in storms, or lap lovingly round them in the summer sunlight.
Fingal's Cave is one of many fringing the cliffs of the little island of Staffa, off the coast of Mull, in Scotland. These caves are all formed of what learned people call basalt, which means rocks moulded by the action of fire. Basalt contains a good deal of an opaque glassy substance, and its colour may be pale blue, dark blue, grey, brown, or black. This rock has a special faculty for building columns with (usually) six sides, but the form varies as much as the colour. These pillars are divided at fairly equal distances into lengths, just as stone pillars in a cathedral are generally built, and, wonderful to say, the joints, when closely examined, are found to be of the cup-and-ball pattern, on which our own bones are put into their sockets.
Basalt is usually hard and tough, and it is supposed, though with no certainty, that the regularity of the columns is the result of the contraction of the rock in cooling after undergoing great heat.
The name Staffa is a Scandinavian word meaning 'Pillar Island,' and no doubt its wonders have been known from very remote times. It is quite near the island of Iona, one of the earliest settlements of the Christian missionaries from Ireland.