LAKES AND CAVES. 45 
The Blue Hill range is about seven miles long, and running cast 
and west, separates this lake from Lake Cunningham—a smaller 
body of shallow water, half a mile wide, and two and two-thirds 
miles in length from east to west. The negro drivers, by design 
or ignorance, palm off this lake upon strangers for Killarney—it 
being nearer and more accessible than the latter. Cunningham, 
with its little mangrove islands, is well worth visiting, and the 
drive for a mile or two through the pine woods and scrub pal- 
mettoes, rendered necessary to reach it, gives one an opportunity 
to see something of the low, wet, rough, and rocky make up of 
portions of the island. Wild flowers and palmetto leaves, gath- 
ered by the wayside, often give a gay and festive appearance to 
the vehicles of the excursionists upon their return near the 
close of day or in the edge of the evening. The Blue Hills 
attain an elevation of 120 feet. 
Caves exist in the western extremity of the hill that separates 
the two lakes, and there is always connected with caverns in the 
rocks enough of the weird and wild and mysterious to make them 
objects of interest. We found it so with these. Indeed their 
proximity to a sea so recently infested by pirates, and their loca- 
tion upon an island not very long ago in possession of a now 
vanished race of men, suggest many a question which only the 
dead can answer. As we followed our dusky guide and passed 
from one chamber to another over the rocks, disturbing and 
driving from their dark retreats the bats, it was not difficult to 
imagine that the ghosts of the cruel and reckless buccaneers, and 
the shades of the unfortunate and grossly wronged Indians, 
were peering at us in the darkness and gloom. But after 
building a fire in the deepest, darkest and most dismal chamber 
of them all, which was entered through a small opening in a 
partition of rock, we experienced a feeling of relief, knowing that 
the elfs of evil vanish with the light. 
