An account of a miraculous triple escape--an escape in which the odds were as a million to one on death. Mr. Wood’s adventure created quite a sensation in South Africa, for it is unique in the annals of the diamond fields. The photographs illustrating the story are published by kind permission of the general manager of the De Beers Consolidated Mines. The following narrative, describing a miner’s miraculous escape from what appeared certain death, forms one of the most sensational episodes in the history of South African mining in general and of the world-famous De Beers Diamond Mines of Kimberley in particular. Miners who have spent many years in the wonderful underground workings of the Kimberley diamond mines, and who have become thoroughly familiar with the perils and thrilling incidents synonymous with underground mining, were dumbfounded at the truly unique experience which befell Mr. Charles Wood at the De Beers Company’s Wesselton Mine, Kimberley, South Africa, on Tuesday, 11th August, 1908. Mr. Wood’s story is here given as related to the author. * * * * * I am twenty-nine years of age, and have been for some years engaged in various capacities in the many departments of the underground workings of the Kimberley diamond mines. During that period I have witnessed many hairbreadth escapes from the innumerable perils of the treacherous subterranean workings, and have seen men launched into eternity in a single second by one or other of those unavoidable happenings which of necessity form part of the miner’s precarious occupation. Personally, however, I have been very fortunate, for my own mining experience has been uneventful--until last week, when I was the victim of a string of events probably unparalleled in the annals of the diamond mines. On the morning of Tuesday, 11th August, 1908, I went to work as usual, and arrived at the mine shaft a few minutes before six o’clock, feeling in high spirits after a brisk and invigorating three-mile bicycle ride in a calm, bracing, and typical South African dawn, which heralded the commencement of a day that was to prove the most eventful and memorable of my life. Precisely as the mine “hooter” sounded, I, with several others, boarded the huge iron man-cage, and in another moment its human freight was being lowered some five hundred feet down the perpendicular shaft to the main working level of the mine.