Note 100 — Business-Life.

He had more perilous escapes from violent death than fall to the lot of most men. He had two narrow escapes from drowning by the river suddenly bursting in upon the Thames-Tunnel works. During the Great Western Railway inspection, he was one day riding a pony rapidly down Boxhill, when the animal stumbled and fell, pitching the engineer on his head; he was taken up for dead, but eventually recovered. One day, when driving an engine through the Box-tunnel, he discerned some light object standing on the same line of road along which his engine was travelling; he turned on the full steam and dashed the object (a contractor’s truck) into a thousand pieces. When on board the Great Western steam-ship, he fell down a hatchway into the hold, and was nearly killed. But the most extraordinary accident which befel him was, in showing a sleight-of-hand trick to his children, his swallowing a half-sovereign, which dropped into his windpipe, remained there for six weeks, when it was removed through an incision in the windpipe, by Sir Benjamin Brodie and Mr. Key; his body was inverted, and after a few coughs, the coin dropped into his mouth. Mr. Brunel used afterwards to say, that the moment when he heard the gold piece strike against his upper front teeth was perhaps the most exquisite in his whole life.—Abridged from the Quarterly Review, No. 223.