After it had lain to dry for three or four days I called “Eddy” and my solid-wheeled cart into requisition, and took it, load by load, down the rocky path to the store-house, where I placed it all safely away in the upper chamber.  The pathway was so narrow in places that the deviation of a few inches would have caused donkey, load, and cart, to be precipitated scores of feet down the abrupt slope into the sea beneath.  To avoid this catastrophe I had to take a pick-axe and shovel, and devote a whole day to widening it in parts, making this, the main path to the top of the island, nowhere less than four feet wide.

I rode home atop of the last load, and at my own door drank my own health, with three cheers for everything and everybody, to which “Flap,” the gull gave a kind of croak, by way of approval to my sentiments.

While my harvest was in progress I met with an adventure which might have terminated the harvesting and my existence at the same time.

It was a boisterous day.  I was tired of digging potatoes, for my back ached, and I wanted a rest.  The Cotills being near the awful crater-like mouth of La Creux Derrible, I thought I would go and explore it, and find out in my own way, all about it; so, dropping my occupation, I wandered slowly down the zig-zag, bracken-hemmed path, lit my pipe, and prepared myself for laziness for an hour.

When I am lazy I like to be thorough.  I cannot bear to be half at work and half at play; it is neither one thing nor another.  So on this occasion I strolled quietly down the pathway, which zig-zags seven or eight times before it ends abruptly on the brow of a little cliff facing La Fauconnaire.  I scrambled down the cliff, across the beach, and over the rocks which form a barrier to the entrance of the cavern leading to the Creux.  I noticed that the tide allowed an entrance to be effected, so I climbed in over the gigantic boulders with which the floor of the black cavern is covered, and soon found myself standing on the pebbly floor of the chasm, looking up at its perpendicular sides, and admiring the various ferns, weeds, and flowers which grew in beauty from its many clefts and fissures.  Then I saw something move in a hole near my feet, and found it to be a wounded rabbit, which had apparently fallen down the shaft from one of the little ledges a hundred and fifty feet above.  The timid little fellow did not attempt to run away, so, picking him up, I examined him and discovered that both his fore legs were broken, and it quite hurt me to see the pitiful look he gave with his bright, prominent, gazelle-like eyes.  I fondled the wounded animal, and looking upward intently, presently saw other little rodents hopping round little ledges near the top, which did not appear, from where I stood, to be so wide as their bodies; but there they were, and although I waited expectantly for a long time for a prospective dinner, no others fell upon me.  I should have been afraid to shoot at them had I had my gun, for fear of detaching pieces of rock, which, falling from such a height, might have crushed my skull in.