The fissure extended back for about two hundred yards, and there terminated in a sharp angle formed by the abrupt walls of the cliffs which enclosed it.  All around there were caverns worn into the base of the precipices by the action of the sea.

The floor of this place was gravelly, but near the water it was strewn with large boulders.  Further in there were no boulders and it was easy to walk about.

At the furthest extremity there was a flat rock that seemed to have fallen from the cliff above in some former age.  The cliffs around were about two hundred feet in height.  They were perfectly bare, and intensely black.  On their storm-riven summits not a sign of verdure appeared.  Everything had the aspect of gloom, which was heightened by the mournful monotone of the sea waves as they dashed against the rock.

After the first feeling of awe had passed, Hubert ran forward, leaping from rock to rock, till he came to where the beach or floor of the fissure was gravelly.  Over this he walked and hastened to the caverns, looking into them one after another.

Then he busied himself by searching among the pebbles for curious stones and shells.  He found here numerous specimens of the rarest and finest treasures of the sea—­shells of a delicacy of tint and perfection of outline; seaweeds of new and exquisite forms with rich hues which he had hitherto believed impossible.

In the hollows of the rocks, where the water yet lay in pools, he found little minnows; and delicate jelly fish, with their long slender fibers; and sea anemones; and sea urchins with their spires extended; and star-fish moving about with their innumerable creepers.  It was a new world, a world which had thus far been only visible to him in the aquarium, and now as it stood before him he forgot all else.

He did not feel the wind as it blew in fresh from the sea—­the dread “sou’wester,” the terror of fishermen.  He did not notice the waves that rolled in more furiously from without, and were now beginning to break in wrath upon the rocky ledges and boulders.  He did not see that the water had crept on nearer to the cliff, and that a white line of foam now lay on that narrow belt of beach which he had traversed at the foot of the cliff.

Suddenly a sound burst upon his ears that roused him, and sent all the blood back to his heart.  It was his own name, called out in a voice of anguish and almost of despair by his father.

He sprang to his feet, started forward and rushed with the speed of the wind to the place by which he had entered the enclosure.  But a barrier lay before him.  The rolling waves were there, rushing in over the rocks, dashing against the cliff, tossing their white and quivering spray exulting in the air.

At once Hubert knew his danger.

He was caught in the “Smuggler’s Trap,” and the full meaning of his uncle’s warning flashed upon his mind as in his terror he shrieked back to his father.