For surf, when eating into land, gnaws to little deeper than low-water mark: no deeper, probably, than the bottoms of the troughs between the waves.

Its tendency is--as one may see along the Ramsgate cliffs--to pare the land away into a flat plain, just covered by a shallow sea.

No surf or currents could nave carved out the smaller Bocas to a depth of between twenty and eighty fathoms; much less the great Boca of the Dragon's Mouth, between Chacachacarra and the Spanish Main, to a depth of more than seventy fathoms.

They are sunken mountain passes, whose sides have been since carved into upright cliffs by the gnawing of the sea; and, as Mr.Wall well observes, {117} 'the situation of the Bocas is in a depression of the range, perhaps of the highest antiquity.' We wandered along the beach, looking up at a cliff clothed, wherever it was not actually falling away, with richest verdure down to the water's edge; but in general utterly bare, falling away too fast to give root-hold to any plant.

We lay down on the black sand, and gazed, and gazed, and picked up quartz crystals fallen from above, and wondered how the cove had got its name.