arms a
very great and a very rough way, and had in so doing all quite tired out
themselves, twice or thrice one after another. They offered me several
remedies, but I would take none, certainly believing that I was mortally
wounded in the head. And, in earnest, it had been a very happy death,
for the weakness of my understanding deprived me of the faculty of
discerning, and that of my body of the sense of feeling; I was suffering
myself to glide away so sweetly and after so soft and easy a manner, that
I scarce find any other action less troublesome than that was. But when
I came again to myself and to resume my faculties:

"Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei,"

["When at length my lost senses again returned."
--Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 14.]

which was two or three hours after, I felt myself on a sudden involved in
terrible pain, having my limbs battered and ground with my fall, and was.
so ill for two or three nights after, that I thought I was once more
dying again, but a more painful death, having concluded myself as good as
dead before, and to this hour am sensible of the bruises of that terrible
shock. I will not here omit, that the last thing I could make them beat
into my head, was the memory of this accident, and I had it over and over
again repeated to me, whither I was going, from whence I came, and at
what time of the day this mischance befell me, before I could comprehend
it. As to the manner of my fall, that was concealed from me in favour to
him who had been the occasion, and other flim-flams were invented. But a
long time after, and the very next day that my memory began to return and
to represent to me the state wherein I was, at the instant that I
perceived this horse coming full drive upon me (for I had seen him at my
heels, and gave myself for gone, but this thought had been so sudden,
that fear had had no leisure to introduce itself) it seemed to me like a
flash of lightning that had pierced my soul, and that I came from the
other world.

This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it
not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really
find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to
approach it. Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself,
provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand. Here, this
is not my doctrine, 'tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but