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SUNDRY PROVIDENCES.
Carlyle somewhere gives utterance to a truism, which the present scribe at least can most gratefully countersign, that "it takes a great deal of providence to bring a man to threescore years and ten." Not only are we in peril every time we take breath, both from the action of our own uncertain hearts and from the living germs of poison floating in the air, but from all sorts of outer accidents (so-called, whereas they all are "well ordered and sure") wherewith our little life is compassed from, cradle to grave; in truth, trifles seem to rule us: "the turning this way or that, the casual stopping or hastening hath saved life or destroyed it, hath built up or flung down fortunes." Every inch and every instant, we are guided and guarded, whether we notice it or not: "the very hairs of our heads are all numbered." Here shall follow some personal experiences in proof. Nearly seventy years ago I knew a small schoolboy of seven who accidentally slit his own throat while cutting a slate-frame against his chest with a sharp knife; there was a knot in the wood, the knife slipped up, a pinafore was instantaneously covered with blood—(though the little semisuicide was unconscious of any pain)—thereafter his neck was quickly strapped with diaculum plaister—and to this day a slight scar may be found on the left side of a silvery beard! Was not this a providential escape? Again—a lively little urchin in his holiday recklessness ran his head pell-mell blindly against a certain cannon post in Swallow Passage, leading from Princes Street, Hanover Square, to Oxford Street, and was so damaged as to have been carried home insensible to Burlington Street: a little more, the doctors said, and it would have been a case of concussion of the brain. The post is still there "to witness if I lie," as Macaulay's Roman ballad has it—and here grown to twice its height, thank heaven! am I. Then again, some ten years after, a youth is seen careering on a chestnut horse in Parliament Street, when a runaway butcher's cart cannoned against his shying steed, the wheel ripping up a saddle-flap, just as the rider had instantaneously shifted his right leg close to the horse's neck! But for that providence, death or a crushed knee was imminent.
Yet again, after some twenty years more: "Æsop Smith" was one dark evening creeping up a hill after a hard ride on his grey mare Brenda, when he was aware of two rough men on the tramp before him, one of whom needlessly crossed over so that they commanded both sides, and soon seemed to be approximating; which when Æsop fortunately noticed, with a quick spur into Brenda he flashed by the rascals as they tried to snatch at his bridle and almost knocked them over right and left whilst he galloped up the hill followed by their curses: was not this an escape worth being thankful for?
Once more: the same equestrian has had two perilous dog-cart accidents, noticeable, for these causes; viz.—broken ribs, and a crushed right hand, have proved to him experimentally how little pain is felt at the moment of a wound; which will explain the unconscious heroism of common soldiers in battle; very little but weakness through loss of blood is ever felt until wounds stiffen: further, a blow on the head not only dazes in the present and stupefies further on, but also completely takes away all memory of a past "bad quarter of an hour." At least I remembered nothing of how my worst misadventure happened; and only know that I crawled home half stunned by moonlight for three miles, holding both sides together with my hands to enable me to breathe: no wonder—all my elasticity was gone with broken ribs. Though these two accidents cost me, one three months, and the other much longer of a (partly bedridden) helplessness, were they not good providences to make one grateful? I write my mental thanksgiving with the same healed broken hand.
So much of perils by land, by way of sample: here are three or four by sea, to match them. Do I not remember how a rash voyager was nearly swept off the Asia's slippery deck in a storm, when a sudden lurch flung him to cling to the side rail of a then unnetted bulwark, swinging him back again by another lurch right over the yawning waves—like an acrobat? Had I let go, no one would have known of that mystery of the sea—where and when a certain celebrity then expected in America, had disappeared! Captain Judkin after that always had his bulwarks netted; so that was a good result of my escape: I was the only passenger on deck, a favoured one—the captain being on his bridge, two men at the wheel in their covered house, the stormy wind all round in a cyclone, and the raging sea beneath—and so all unseen I had been swept away—but for good providence.
Once again; do I not shudderingly recollect how nearly the little Guernsey steamer was run over by an American man-of-war in the Channel, because a tipsy captain would "cross the bows of that d—— d Yankee:"—the huge black prow positively hung over us—and it was a miracle that we were not sunk bodily in the mighty waters. What more? Well, I will here insert an escaped danger that tells its own tale in a sonnet written at the time, the place being Tenby and the sea-anemone caverns there, accessible only at lowest neap tide.
"An hour of peril in the Lydstep caves:
Down the steep gorge, grotesquely boulder-piled
And tempest-worn, as ocean hurrying wild
Up it in thunder breaks and vainly raves—
My haste hath sped me to the rippled sand
Where, arching deep, o'erhang on either hand
These halls of Amphitrité, echoing clear
The ceaseless mournful music of the waves:
Ten thousand beauteous forms of life are here;
And long I linger, wandering in and out
Among the seaflowers, tapestried about
All over those wet walls.—A shout of fear!
The tide, the tide!—I turned and ran for life,
And battled stoutly through that billowy strife!"
Perhaps this is enough of such hairbreadth 'scapes both by land and water: though I might (in America especially) mention many more. Then there are all manner of the ordinary maladies of humanity, which I pretermit. Carlyle was quite right; it does require "a good deal of providence" to come to old age.
CHAPTER IX.
YET MORE ESCAPES.
But there are many other sorts of peril in human life to which I may briefly advert, as we all have had some experiences of the same. Who does not know of his special financial temptation, some sanguine and unscrupulous speculator urging him from rock to rock across the rapids of ruin, till he is engulfed as by Niagara? Or of the manifestly disinterested and generous capitalist, who gives to some young legatee a junior partner's free arm-chair, only that he may utilise his money and keep the house solvent for yet a year or two, utterly unheeding that ere long the grateful beneficiaire must be dragged down with his chief to poverty? Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will, stealing our rights by evil influence? Or of the seemingly luckless accident killing off our intending benefactor just before that promised codicil? Or of the ruinous investment? Or of the bankrupt Life Assurance? Or of the unhappy fact of your autograph, "a mere matter of form," on the back of some dishonoured bill of one's defaulting friend? Yet all these are providences too—lessons of life, and parts of our schools and schoolmasters.
And there are many like social evils besides. Let me delicately touch one of them. I desire as an Ancient, now nearing the close of my career, at least in this the caterpillar and soon to be chrysalis condition of my being, to give my testimony seriously and practically to the fact (disputed by too many from their own worse experience) that it is quite possible to live from youth to
