The Gate of Death Author:Arthur Christopher Benson 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: that it had done and been and thought. And yet this destruction of memory in my own case seems to point that way. On the morning of the 27th of January, I am ... more »told, I went out for a walk about twelve o'clock, after writing some letters. There is a short drive from the front door leading down to the road. Close to the gate stand three fine Scotch firs, up which ivy had been allowed to grow, and the trees had begun to suffer; a month or two before, the ivy stems had been carefully cut through near the roots, and the plants were now dead, the leaves brown and withered. The gardener had set a long ladder up against the first tree and was stripping off the withered tendrils from the trunk. I stood, I am told, and watched him ; and when he had stripped the first tree, and had set the ladder up against the second, I expressed a wish to try my hand at the work. I went up to a height of some twenty feet. He is not quite clear what happened, but he thinks that in reaching round the tree to pick off a twining branch, my foot slipped off the rung of the ladder, and in trying chapter{Section 4to recover my hold, I overbalanced and fell prostrate on the ground, upon my back. He says that I uttered a stifled cry, half raised myself, and then, putting my hand to my head, sank back unconscious. I had received a blow on the head which had stunned me, but that was one of the least serious of my injuries. He got help, and I was carried into the vicarage ; a doctor was sent for, and I was attended to. My legs were paralysed, and it was feared that I had lacerated the spinal cord. The doctor did not think that I should live through the day, and for a week I was more or less unconscious, hanging between life and death. But of all these events I have not the smallest recollection. June 20. My ...« less