“In this manner, sleeping under hedges and haystacks, and eating potatoes, whenever I could get them, I travelled for five days, till I was beginning to get foot-sore, when I suddenly beheld the sea from the top of a hill, with a large town at the foot, and a number of vessels lying alongside of a quay. To my boyish eyes, the sea was a glorious object, and I said to myself, ‘I will be a sailor.’ I knew what a ship was, and what a sailor was, for I remember reading a penny ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and being in raptures with it, and vowing at the time I would be a sailor. I met a man driving a flock of sheep, and I asked him the name of the town. “‘Bantry,’ says he, and I walked on. I thought the sight I viewed from that hill one of the finest I ever saw, and faith I think so still; as I did when years afterwards I stood upon the same spot, having ascended the hill for the very purpose of bringing my boyish recollection more vivid to my mind. I was descending the hill, a good carriage road winding down it, when I heard a post-chaise coming rapidly after me. I turned and soon perceived that an accident had happened. The pole chain had snapped, and the carriage, which was a gentleman’s, laden with a good deal of luggage, was pressing on the back of one horse and knocking him down, whilst the other was kicking and plunging; and a lady with her head out of the window calling out to the postillion to stop: but you might as well have tried to stop a nor’-wester with a lady’s parasol. Just as they reached me, the horse, whose pole chain was broken, fell, the carriage gave a lurch, and over it went on the side next the precipice; the door was burst open, and out rolled a little boy scarcely two years old, and with him a curious woolly dog, a poodle; I did not know its name then. Though stupefied and terrified when I saw the child tumble out, the lady’s shriek roused me. I rushed over the side, caught the child’s garments in one hand, and we rolled down the precipice together some twenty or thirty yards. I luckily grasped a branch of furze just as we were going to topple over the edge of a cliff, full fifty or sixty feet perpendicular, and held on like grim death, still keeping a fast hold of the little boy, the confounded dog sticking to me like a leech, as if it was I that was rolling over the precipice, not his young master, for my special amusement. He bit me two or three times, for I could not help myself; if I let go the child he would tumble over the edge, and if I let go the furze we were sure both to go. I looked up and beheld the lady and another female above, screaming and clapping their hands, and a gentleman cautiously groping his way down to where we were.