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 Amphitrite, 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