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.
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.