loosened by recent rains.
 |
| ALMOST A TRAGEDY. |
A young American girl came along on a mule, and in making the turn the mule's hind foot caved all the loose masonry and one of the fence posts over board; the mule gave a violent lurch in board to save himself, and succeeded in the effort, but that girl turned as white as the snows of Mont Blanc for a moment.
The path here was simply a groove cut into the face of the precipice; there was a four-foot breadth of solid rock under the traveler, and a four-foot breadth of solid rock just above his head, like the roof of a narrow, porch; he could look out from this gallery and see a sheer summitless and bottomless wall of rock before him, across a gorge or crack a biscuit's toss in width,—but he could not see the bottom of his own precipice unless he lay down and projected his nose over the edge. I did not do this, because I did not wish to soil my clothes.
Every few hundred yards, at particularly bad places, one came across a panel or so of plank fencing; but they were always old and weak, and they generally leaned out over the chasm and did not make any rash promises to hold up people who might need support. There was one of these panels
