e cuts--none of them serious--on his head. The
board stretched across the shaft, twenty feet from the bottom, had saved
him from being dashed to pieces; but had inflicted at the same time,
where his left side had struck it, the only injury that appeared
dangerous to the medical man--a large, hard lump that could be felt
under the bruised skin. The boy showed no symptoms of fever; his pulse,
day after day, was found never varying from eighty-two to the minute;
his appetite was voracious; and the internal functions of his body only
required a little ordinary medicine to keep them properly at work. In
short, nothing was to be dreaded but the chance of the formation of an
abscess in his left side, between the hip and ribs. He had been under
medical care exactly one week, when I accompanied the doctor on a visit
to him.

The cottage where he lived with his parents, though small, was neat and
comfortable. We found him lying in bed, awake. He looked languid and
lethargic; but his skin was moist and cool; his face displayed no
paleness, and no injury of any kind. He had just eaten a good dinner of
rabbit-pie, and was anxious to be allowed to sit up in a chair, and
amuse himself by looking out of the window. His left side was first
examined. A great circular bruise discoloured the skin, over the whole
space between the hip and ribs; but on touching it, the doctor
discovered that the lump beneath had considerably decreased in size, and
was much less hard than it had felt during previous visits. Next we
looked at his back and arms--they were scratched and bruised all over;
but nowhere seriously. Lastly, the dressings were taken off his head,
and three cuts were disclosed, which even a non-medical eye could easily
perceive to be of no great importance. Such were all the results of a
fall of seventy-eight feet.

The boy's father reiterated to me the account of the accident, just as I
had already heard it from the doctor. How it happened, he said, could
only be guessed, for his son had completely forgotten all the
circumstances immediately preceding the fall; neither could he
communicate any of the sensations which must have attended it. Most
probably, he had been sitting dangling his legs idly over the mouth of
the shaft, and had so slipped in. But however the accident really
happened, there the sufferer was before us--less seriously hurt than
many a lad who has trodden on a piece of orange peel as he was walking
along the street.