48 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



through the less crowded streets, and sometimes took 

 great risks in venturing about alone.* He was often 

 driven to exposures which a little money might have 

 enabled him to avoid, and thus poverty hindered and 

 jeopardized his recovery. One of his worst exposures, 

 however, was connected with an incident of which I 

 never heard until after his death, when I came to put 

 together this memoir. In 1842, as he was picking his 

 Avay along one of the riverside streets near the edge 

 of a wharf, he heard a sudden splash in the water and 

 cries for help close by. Instantly seizing a large chain 

 that happened to be within reach, fastened at one end 

 to a post on the wharf, he let himself down into the 

 water, got hold of the drowning man, and kept him 

 up until help came, thus saving his life. It was mid- 

 winter, and this stay of several minutes in the freezing 

 water brought on a violent fever, which detained Ed- 

 ward for nearly three months in a hospital, while his 

 anxious family had no news of him. It was eighteen 

 months before his sight could be brought back even 

 to the dim twilight condition it was in at the time of 

 the accident. This brave act was just like Youmans, 

 and it was also like him never to speak of it. 



A pleasant incident of his first year in New York 

 led shortly to results of much consequence. Some 

 time during his stay at Mrs. Cook's his watch needed 

 mending, and he was told to take it to Mr. James 



* Once a man who was carrying a plank on his shoulder on the side- 

 walk hit him with it so violently that his fall injured him seriously. His 

 narrowest escape was one evening when, in going from Mr. Flanders's to 

 his home in New York, he found himself at the very brink of the water 

 wall below Fulton Ferry, where one step more would have precipitated, 

 him into the East River, It was not built up then for a considerable dis- 

 tance below the present upper entrance to the ferry. 



