He crossed one leg over the other and slowly turned the pages of the notebook, reading dates and entries here and there, written in his own hand, and thanking the Lord afresh as he saw how in every time of need and danger He had stretched out His hand to aid. Once he had lain so ill of small-pox that his life had been despaired of--yet it had been saved. And once, when he was a boy, a beer-vat had fallen on him. A large quantity of beer was being brewed for a wedding, in the old days when the brewing was done at home; and a vat had fallen over, pinning the boy beneath it. It had taken six people to lift it up again, and his head had been crushed so that the blood ran down in streams. He was carried into a shop, and, as he still breathed, the doctor and the surgeon were sent for. They told the father to prepare for the worst and to bow to the will of God. But the Almighty had blessed the work of healing, and the boy was saved and restored to health. The Consul dwelt a while upon this account, re-living the accident in his mind. Then he took his pen again and wrote after his last “Amen”: “Yea, O God, I will eternally praise Thee!” Another time, his life had been saved from danger by water, when he had gone to Bergen, as a young man. The account read: “At high water, when the freight boats of the Northern Line are in, we have great difficulty getting through the press to our landing. I was standing on the edge of the scow, with my feet on the thole-pins, leaning my back against the sailboat, trying to get the scow nearer in, when, as luck would have it, the oak thole-pins broke, and I went head over heels into the water. The first time I came up, nobody was near enough to get hold of me; the second time, the scow went over my head. There were plenty of people there anxious to save me, but they had to keep the sailboat and the scow off, so that I should not come up under them; and all their shoving would probably have been in vain if a rope had not suddenly broken on one of the sailboats belonging to the Line, so that she swung further out; and this, by the grace of God, gave me room enough to come up in free water. It was only the top of my head, with the hair, that they saw; but it was enough, for they were all lying on their stomachs with their heads sticking out over the scow, and the man at the bow grabbed me by the hair, and I got hold of his arm. He was in an unsafe position himself and could not hold me, but he gave a yell, and they all took hold of him around the waist and pulled. I hung on, though he bit me to make me let go. So they got me in at last.” There followed a long prayer of thanksgiving, which the Consul re-read with tear-wet eyes.