and his ribs crushed. The doctor, who is a very eminent and successful
surgeon, resuscitated him, set his broken bones, and in a few weeks
what was thought to be a dead man, was able to move about the prison
enclosure, although one of his limbs was shorter than the other, and
he was rendered a cripple for life.

On another occasion a convict was standing at the base of the shaft.
The plumb-bob, a piece of lead about the size of a goose egg,
accidentally fell from the top of the shaft, a distance of eight
hundred feet, and, striking this colored man on the head, it mashed
his skull, and bespattered the walls with his brains.

I had three narrow escapes from death. One day I lay in my little room
resting, and after spending some time stretched out upon the ground, I
started off to another part of my room to go to work, when all of a
sudden the roof fell in, and dropped down just where I had been lying.
Had I remained a minute longer in that place, I would have been
killed. As it happened, the falling debris just struck my shoe as I
was crawling out from the place where the material fell.

At another time I had my room mined out and was preparing to take down
the coal. I set my wedges in a certain place above the vein of coal
and began to strike with my sledge hammer, when I received a
presentiment to remove my wedges from that place to another. Now I
would not have the reader believe that I was in any manner
superstitious, but I was so influenced by that presentiment that I
withdrew my wedges and set them in another place; then I proceeded to
strike them a second time with the sledge hammer, when, unexpectedly,
the vein broke and the coal fell just opposite to where my head was
resting, and came within an inch of striking it. Had I remained in the