To ascend these with a crutch under such circumstances was no less than a dangerous undertaking. The superintendent advised me not to try it, but I could not act upon his advice, from the fact that I had “made up my mind” to go up. (It’s a wonder I didn’t “go up,” in another way.) If there had not been a small iron railing to cling to, I could never have reached the head of that almost interminable staircase. As it was, I came near falling backward, and only saved myself by clutching this railing.
Should one start to fall down these steps, nothing would save him. They wind around and around, with here and there only a narrow landing, not more than twice the width of a stair, and too narrow to arrest the progress of a descending form. One might as well leap down from the top, either outside or within the circular shaft around which the stairs wind, as to go tumbling around and around, down, down, down, the solid spiral stairway, thumped and beaten by the edges of two or three hundred stone steps; for in either case I suppose that brandy and water wouldn’t save him.
I reached the top pretty tired, after having ascended two hundred and ninety-five icy steps; and from this height of two hundred feet, had a good view of Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, and the harbor.
Finding it rather cold up there—for there were several good sized windows open for the wind to blow in at, and visitors to look out of—I soon made up my mind to descend; in fact the cold was so severe that it had a rather benumbing effect on me; and as my thigh and the calf of my leg fairly ached from my recent exertions, I fully realized the danger of descending, and fancied I would have made a considerable pecuniary sacrifice to be safely at the base of the tall structure. There was no way to get there, however, but to _walk_ down, if it might be so called, and I began the perilous descent. I was not half way down when my crutch and cane both slipped from an icy step, and I fell. O, what a fall there would have been, my countrymen, if I hadn’t caught the iron railing! I gripped the cold iron with my right hand, and arrested my crutch with my left; but my cane escaped me, and away it went, tumbling knocking, cracking rattling and clattering, till it reached the bottom. I fancied it took it something like a minute to make the descent, but the probability is that the time it occupied in the journey was not more than ten seconds. Its last echo had just died away, when I heard the voice of the superintendent calling to me from below; and his voice had a kind of twisty sound by the time it wound its way up to me.