Miraculous Escapes.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 7 August 1914, Page 2

Miraculous Escapes.

At Geneva recently, a professional acrobat who performs on a trapeze attached to a balloon fell into the Liake of Zurich, a distance of 1,500 ft. He swam unhurt to the shore, just missing death by a few yards, for had he not sprung from his seat when within 50ft. of the lake he would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks. Sveral instances of people falling from incredible heights and surviving to tell the tale can be quoted. At Brighton quite recently an actor known ,as Lieutenant Hearing, who was playing the part of a naval officer who is attacked by brigands in a cinematograph play, and who was supposed to slip over the cliff —in reality, however, to stand on a plank which had been placed below the edge to make the illusion complete—missed his footing and fell 90ft. below into the sea, escaping with a sprained wrist. An even more miraculous escape after a fall over a cliff was that of a seven-year-old child who had been gathering flowers on Culver Cliff, near Sandown, Isle of Wight, who slipped and fell 200 ft, She was only slightly injured, a bottle which she carried being unbroken. Often the merest accident prevents death. A Cardiff labourer some time ago fell from a scaffolding about 50ft. high, but as he fell his foot caught in the scaffolding, and he hung head downwards until rescued. Similarly a woman who fell out of a window backwards at Holborn lately was "Saved from instant death by her clothing having caught in the window-catch.

John TTazelton, the son of the Rev. John Hazelton, of St. Noet's, Huntingdonshire, when; cycling between Huntingdon and St. Neofs at night, was suddenly lifted off his bicycle by a passing motor and was carried on the bonnet >'or a considerable distance ! efore being gently deposited on the road as the car pulled up. His cycle was smashed to atoms.

At six o'clock one morning the owner of liatherton Mill at Nantwich heard cries which seemed to proceed from beneath the mill floor. He pulled up the boards and there, clinging to a branch of a tree which had come down the river with the flood and had got wedged in the sluice, was a Nantwich farmer, Mr. Reginald Dutton, who, returning home the previous night had fallen from a stile into the water. The presence of the branch in the deep mill-pool saved his life.