Many a
warning had I had from the good fishermen and sea-folk, that some day
I should fall from top to bottom--fall and break my neck. A laugh was
my sole answer to these warnings; for, with the possession of perfect
health, I had inherited that instinctive belief in good luck which
perfect health will often engender.
However, my punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding
gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic landslips.
These landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by
a further fall, called a 'settlement.' The word 'settlement' explains
itself, perhaps. No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide
seems on that coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land,
and the debris of a landslip will sometimes, though not always,
respond to it by again falling and settling into new and permanent
shapes.
Now, on the morning after a great landslip, when the coastguard,
returning on his beat, found a cove where, half-an-hour before, he
had left his own cabbages growing, I, in spite of all warnings, had
climbed the heap of _debris_ from the sands, and while I was
hallooing triumphantly to two companions below--the two most
impudent-looking urchins, bare-footed and unkempt, that ever a
gentleman's son forgathered with--a great mass of loose earth
settled, carrying me with it in its fall.
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