A BOY IN A WELL.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 488, 12 July 1890, Page 6

A BOY IN A WELL.

Plucky Efforts to Escape Death.

A lively- fourteen-year-old lad named Jones, in the country town of Preston, Connecticut, lias had an experience, the memory of which will abide with him. In the rear of his homo is a very deep well, the curbing of which is of seamless sections of big drain tiles smoothly dovetailed together. In leaning over the well to recover his jackknife, which had fallen on the edge of the well, lie lost his balance, and plunged head first down the dark cylinder. It is forty-five feet to the water and fifteen feet farther to the bottom.

The boy caught tho well rope, bub went to the bottom in an instant. Then he came to the surface, and being an expert swimmer easily kept himself afloat. He called for help, but evidently his voice barely soared to the surface of the earth. He swam around the sides of hi 3 perpendicular prison a few times, and the desperate nature of his condition was apparent. But he was plucky. If he kept on swimming long, ho reasoned, he would soon be exhausted and sink. So he managed to fix his head and shoulders against one side of the well and his feet against the opposite one, and in that position rested for several moments.

He then gazed upward. The tall shaft narrowed liko a tunnel above him, and at the top was capped by a round segment of blue sky, which seemed immensely far away. Tho boy decided to make an effort to climb to tho top of the well. The well tiling is very wide, bub the boy was barefooted and his muscular toes and fingers stuck bo the smooth curb like tho feelers of a leech.

Ho began to crawl upward. He went slowly and without a slip until he was within a foot or two of the top of tho shaft, and then suddenly Iris clutch slipped and a second time he shot down the well, going to the bottom. He came to the surface of the water quickly, and after a moment’s rest again began his toilsome upward climb, and again, when within a foot of its top, he lost his hold and plunged again to its bottom. A third time he essayed fho feat, and that time was successful. He .pulled himself out of the shaft, stepped over the well curb, and fell breathless and exhausted on the ground. The flesh had been stripped from his finget'3 bv tho cutting grain of the drain tiles and his finger nails were worn to the quick.