not owe my escape merely to
my acquaintance with chlorite and its properties. For the full
development of the moral instincts of our nature, one may lead a life by
much too quiet and too secure: a sprinkling in one's lot of sudden
perils and hair-breadth escapes is, I am convinced, more wholesome, if
positive superstition be avoided, than a total absence of danger. For my
own part, though I have, I trust, ever believed in the doctrine of a
particular Providence, it has been always some narrow escape that has
given me my best evidences of the vitality and strength of the belief
within. It has ever been the touch of danger that has rendered it
emotional. A few years after this time, when stooping forward to examine
an opening fissure in a rock front, at which I was engaged in quarrying,
a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so
closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet,
and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There was
nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence; but the gush
of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set
at nought the scepticism which should have held that there was no
Providence in it. On another occasion, I paused for some time, when
examining a cave of the old-coast line, directly under its low-browed
roof of Old Red conglomerate, as little aware of the presence of danger
as if I had been standing under the dome of St. Paul's; but when I next
passed the way, the roof had fallen, and a mass, huge enough to have
given me at once death and burial, cumbered the spot which I had
occupied. On yet another occasion, I clambered a few yards down a
precipice, to examine some crab-apple trees, which, springing from a
turret-like projection of the rock, far from gardens and nurseries, had
every mark of being indigenous; and then, climbing up among the
branches, I shook them in a manner that must have exerted no small
leverage power on the outjet beneath, to possess myself of some of the
fruit, as the native apples of Scotland. On my descent, I marked,
without much thinking of the matter, an apparently recent crack running
between the outjet and the body of the precipice. I found, however,
cause enough to think of it on my return, scarce a month after; for then
both outjet and trees lay broken and fractured on the beach more than a
hundred feet below. With such momentum had even the slimmer twigs been
dashed