build their nests in the cliffs will think you are coming to get their eggs, and they will fly screaming around you and try to pick your eyes out."

"I'll shoot them," said John, speaking up very valiantly. "Or if I had an umbrella I would open it suddenly and flap it in their faces, and frighten them half to death.”

After about three days the whole party were well satisfied with what they had

seen of Ryde, and were very ready to move on. The question was which way to go. Florence, as queen, was to decide this question. Mrs. Morelle said she had nothing to say about it. She was sure that it would be to some pleasant place or other, and it was immaterial to her in what order the pleasant places were taken.

"You can consult your ministers, if you please," said she, "but you must hold your consultation by yourselves out of my hearing, for I want to finish my book."

Mrs. Morelle had obtained a very interesting book at the circulating library, and was sitting, when she said this, near a window which commanded a charming view of the pier and of the sea, so that she could amuse herself in the pauses of her reading by looking out over the water and seeing what new steamers

or ships had come in sight, or what changes had taken place in those that were in sight before, since the last time that she had observed them.

She also, while stopping here, had an opportunity of watching the firing of a salute from a battery at Portsmouth. The distance was so great that a very considerable interval elapsed, after the flash and the smoke of each gun were seen, before the sound of the report reached her

ear.

CHAPTER XI.

ABOUT CHINES.

WHEN the queen opened her consultation with her ministers on the question of the next move to be made by the party-which she did seated in the sheltered compartment of the funny summer-house, as John called it, near the end of the pier―John proposed at once that they should go to the Black Gang Chine.

He had no idea what Black Gang Chine was or where it was, but there was something in the name that struck his fancy.

"That does not come next," said Grimkie. "Shanklin Chine comes next in our way. And besides Shanklin Chine is a great deal prettier than Black Gang Chine. Black Gang Chine is terribly desolate and gloomy place."

"That's exactly the reason why I want to go and see it," said John. "But Grimkie, what is a chine ?"

There are a great many chines, as they are called, around the shores of the Isle of Wight, though the only ones that are much talked of

abroad are Shanklin Chine and Black Gang Chine; and as the reader may, like John, not know exactly what a chine is, I will explain it.

It is, in fact, nothing but what we should call in this country a great gulley!

One would not think it possible that there could be any thing attractive or beautiful in a gulley, and yet Shanklin Chine is one of the most wonderful and charming objects in the world.

The case is this. The ground which forms the mass of the Isle of Wight, though in some places it consists of vast beds of chalk, hundreds, and, perhaps, thousands of feet thick, and rising into great swelling ranges of hills hundreds of feet high, and in other parts of other kinds of rocks, is formed in many places of immense beds of sand, of various colors in the different layers, and extending downward to unfathomable depths below the surface, and rising often by the sea to one or two hundred feet above. The sand in these beds is very fine, and the prevailing colors are green and brown. This sand is not loose, but it is half hardened into stone, so that as you see it in the cliffs it has all the appearance of stone, and yet if you break out a lump of it you can crumble it without much difficulty in your hand.

Now, whenever a brook, in flowing down from the up country of the island, comes to the sea at a point where the cliffs are formed of these beds of sand, it is found that it has worn, in the .course of ages, an immense ravine or gulley, of the most wild and fantastic form, and these ravines are called chines. There are several of these chines alone the southern coast of the island, but Shanklin Chine is the most beautiful and the most celebrated of them all.

It is nearly a quarter of a mile long, and the sides, which are nearly perpendicular, though full of the most fantastic and picturesque irregularities, are more than two hundred feet high. The village, which stands at the head of the chine, is three hundred feet above the sea. There is a winding and zigzag road which goes down the shore north of the chine, but through the chine itself there is only a foot-path. Visitors usually go down through the chine by the path, and then return up the cliffs outside by the winding road which follows certain natural hollows and valleys in a very picturesque and pretty

manner.

But the great charm of the chine, and of the environs of it, is the vegetation. There seems to be some principle of fertility in these sands, indurated as they are, which causes them to produce