elow, they were not rough enough, or yielding enough, or in any
way dangerous enough for me.

So I used to fashion 'gangways' of my own; I used to descend the
cliff at whatsoever point it pleased me, clinging to the lumps of
sandy earth with the prehensile power of a spider-monkey. Many a
warning had I had from the good fishermen and sea-folk, that some day
I should fall from top to bottom--fall and break my neck. A laugh was
my sole answer to these warnings; for, with the possession of perfect
health, I had inherited that instinctive belief in good luck which
perfect health will often engender.

However, my punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding
gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic landslips.
These landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by
a further fall, called a 'settlement.' The word 'settlement' explains
itself, perhaps. No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide
seems on that coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land,
and the debris of a landslip will sometimes, though not always,
respond to it by again falling and settling into new and permanent
shapes.

Now, on the morning after a great landslip, when the coastguard,
returning on his beat, found a cove where, half-an-hour before, he
had left his own cabbages growing, I, in spite of all warnings, had
climbed the heap of _debris_ from the sands, and while I was
hallooing triumphantly to two companions below--the two most
impudent-looking urchins, bare-footed and unkempt, that ever a
gentleman's son forgathered with--a great mass of loose earth
settled, carrying me with it in its fall. I was taken up for dead.

It was, however, only a matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And
there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to
have his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a
cripple. The great central fact--the very pivot upon which all the
wheels of my life have since been turning--is that for two years
during the impressionable period of childhood I walked with crutches.

It must not be supposed that my tears--the tears which at this moment
were blotting out the light and glory of the North Sea in the
sun--came from the pain I was suffering. They came from certain
terrible news, which even my brother Frank had been careful to keep
from me, but which had fallen from the lips of my father--the news
that I was not unlikely to be a cripple for li