ith 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 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 enoug