The roof is high, with an effect of Gothic arches.  Near the mouth is a tiny spring of ice-cold water, which has worn a clean rock-channel for itself to the sea.  Otherwise the cave is perfectly dry.  The shining white sand of its floor is above the highest watermark on the cliffs outside.  There is no doubt in my mind that in the great buccaneering days of the seventeenth century, and probably much later, the place was the haunt of pirates.  One fancies that Captain Sampson of the Bonny Lass may have known of it before he brought the treasure to the island.  There were queer folk to be met with in those days in the Western Ocean!  The cave is cool at blazing midday, and secret, I fancy, even from the sea, because of the droop of great rock-eaves above its mouth.  Either for the keeping of stores or as a hiding-place for men or treasure it would be admirable.  Yes, the cave has seen many a fierce, sea-tanned face and tarry pigtail, and echoed to strange oaths and wild sea-songs.  Men had carved those steps in the passage—­thirty-two of them.  In the sand of the floor, as I kicked it up with my feet, hoping rather childishly to strike the corner of the chest, I found the hilt and part of the blade of a rusty cutlass, and a chased silver shoe-buckle.  I shall take the buckle home to Helen—­and yet how trivial it will seem, with all else that I have to offer her!  Nevertheless she will prize it as my gift, and because it comes from the place to which some kind angel led me for her sake.

I left the cave and hurried back to the cabin for a spade, walking on air, breaking with snatches of song the terrible stillness of the woods, where one hears only the high fitful sighing of the wind, or the eternal mutter of the sea.  As I came out of the hut with the spade over my shoulder I waved my hand to the Island Queen riding at anchor.

“You’ll soon be showing a clean pair of heels to Leeward, old girl!” I cried.  Back in the cave, I set to work feverishly, making the light sand fly.  I began at the rear of the cavern, reasoning that there the sand would lie at greater depth, also that it would be above the wash of the heaviest storms.  At the end of half an hour, at a point close to the angle of the wall my spade struck a hard surface.  It lay, I should judge, under about two feet of sand.  Soon I had laid bare a patch of dark wood which rang under my knuckles almost like iron.  A little more, and I had cleared away the sand from the top of a large chest with a convex lid, heavily bound in brass.

Furiously I flung the sand aside until the chest stood free for half its depth—­which is roughly three feet.  It has handles at the ends, great hand-wrought loops of metal.  I tugged my hardest, but the chest seemed fast in its place as the native rock.  I laughed exultantly.  The weight meant gold—­gold!  I had hammer and chisel with me, and with these I forced the massive ancient locks.  There were three of them, one for each strip of brass which bound the chest.  Then I flung up the lid.