Perhaps the most thrilling and exciting moment on my various travels was that spent on a trolley-car in Southern Mexico. Along those distant tracks barely two or three trains pass in a day, and hundreds, aye, thousands, of miles of railway have to be kept in repair. It is usual for the engineers to run along the line in a little open wagon, known as a trolley-car, which is worked by hand by four or six men, and covers the ground at a good pace. It can stop at any moment, and be lifted bodily off the line should a train require to pass. Naturally, one sees the scenery magnificently from a car of this kind, for there is nothing before one. I was sitting in front with an engineer on each side of me. We had just come through one of the most magnificent passes in the world of engineering, and had, indeed, at that moment crossed a bridge, a slender, fragile thing. Some two or three hundred feet below it the water gurgled in a rushing stream. Parrots shrieked overhead, terrapins floated on the water, and monkeys swung from tree to tree. There was a precipice on one side, a high, rocky hill on the other, and just room for this mountainous line to crawl round the rocks. We were all telling stories and chatting cheerfully: the next thing I knew was that the man on my right seized me by the neck, as if he suddenly wished to strangle me, and somehow he and I fell together a tangled mass down the side of the precipice. When I looked up—luckily caught in the shrubs—an enormous engine was towering over my head, the grid-like rails of the cow-catcher looking ominous and weird above me. The splintered platform of the trolley-car was rushing down the mountain-side, and our iron wheels were running off in different directions. It was a marvel we were not all killed. It had happened in this wise. As we turned a sharp corner an engine suddenly bore down on us—one of those great black, high American locomotives, neither varnished nor painted. The engineers, accustomed to the ominous sound, luckily heard it before it was quite upon us. Hence, I was violently dragged from what, in another second, would have been instantaneous death. The natives all jumped off in some wonderful manner, also being accustomed to the sound; but our trolley-car was smashed to smithereens. It was a ghastly experience. By the time I regained my equilibrium, and saw the horrible accident to our frail little carriage and learnt the awful danger we had just come through, I realised that I had just experienced one of the most perilous moments of my life. I should have sat there oblivious and literally courted death. We never know life’s real dangers till they are past, hence the courage of the battlefield or shipwreck. We only worry over what we but partially understand, hence the anxiety so often experienced before sitting in the dentist’s chair. Anticipation is so much sharper than realisation. This was not my only narrow escape, for I was blessed with the proverbial three.