"Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free! So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia." With a rush of wings and frantic clamor of screams, a flock of upland geese (_Chloëphaga magellanica_) rose from some hidden marsh beneath, and fled in ordered phalanx to some distant sanctuary; whereupon Power yelled that ecstatic "Hurrah!" anew. Here was life! Here was a world that smiled and was not dumb! He must hurry, hurry, and enter into this Paradise! Yet it came to pass, as so often happens in the most commonplace phases of man's life, that, at the very moment when the worst stage of the journey was nearing its end, when he had accomplished the almost impossible, when the leaping torrents of the hills were merging into a stream which, if turbid and noisy, bore some semblance to a river, he met with a disaster that brought death even nearer than it had come at any other crisis of his extraordinary career. The track, rough as it was, offered comparatively easy going. Now winding round the inner curve of some huge fold in the hill, soon it would swing boldly out across the face of a promontory of rock; while passing one of these awesome precipices, which actually jutted out so far beyond its own base that Power could not see the river, though he could hear its mighty voice roaring among bowlders, he fell. That is to say, the broad ledge sank away beneath his feet, and, after a vain spring toward a section which still gripped the rocky wall, he fell with it. He uttered no cry, made no plaint to Heaven. His brain worked with inconceivable rapidity, and he knew that he had been flung from a sheer height of well over a hundred feet. Thus, unless he dropped into deep water, and managed to retain his senses, either outcome of the accident being wildly improbable, he must be crushed into a pulp when he came to earth. He petitioned the Most High that, if this was death, it might be instantaneous, that his soul might go out of its worn tabernacle in merciful oblivion, that he might not be called on to lie, maimed and inert, watching the gathering of vultures. Then some mighty hand seemed to seize him in an irresistible grip, and he lost consciousness.