Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. THE TREASON OF IVAN ILIITCH. It is passing strange how slight a thing will sometimes kill a man; and still more strange, how much a man may endure and yet live. I have seen soldiers die of a flesh wound, and yet other soldiers live with a fragment of shell lodged in the brain. When I took that wild leap over the verge of the precipice, I thought my hour was come, and my heart was bitter within me,?though I felt it a joy to die with her. For a moment I poised on the window- ledge above the chasm, and then it was as if the world had slipped from beneath our feet; falling? falling?falling?an eternity of anguish held me in thrall; and then came darkness. But Fate had not done with Philip Farquhar. When I awakened to consciousness, it was borne in upon me that we had miraculously escaped the awful doom of those who had gone before us. Three hundred men, women and children, the survivors of the massacre, had chosen the abyss! The few who had been the last to leap into the chasm were preserved from death by falling on that ghastly wall of mortality instead of the rocky floor of the gulch ! It was very sweet for me to hear my love murmuring brokenly in my ear; it was very sweet to feel hergentle touch as she soothed my throbbing temples, as she hung above me, wailing softly, and pleading with me to wake again; and I fear me that I dissembled, even in that fearsome place, that I might hear all she would say. But I was not seriously hurt, merely unstrung by the shock of the fall,?which, looking from below, did not seem so vast,?and my great fear for her. Happily, she was wholly uninjured. Ivan, and some half-dozen others, had survived the descent; and though most of these had suffered more or less injury, each urged the necessity for immediate flight. The vi…
