The accident which forms the subject of this paper occurred August 29,
1890, at South Harpswell, Casco Bay, Me., where I was passing my
vacation.
At about 9.30 A.M., M. B----, an American, aged eighteen, the son of a
fisherman, a young man of steady habits and a good constitution, with
excellent muscular development, and who had never before required the
aid of a physician, was seen by the residents of the village to fall
forward from a skiff into the water and go down with uplifted hands. I
could not learn that he rose at all after the first submersion. Two
men were standing near a bluff which overlooked the bay, and after an
instant's delay in deciding that an accident had occurred, they ran
over an uneven and undulating pasture for a distance of two hundred
and fifty paces to the shore. One of them, after a quick decision not
to swim out to where the young man had fallen in and dive for him,
removed trousers and boots and waded out five yards to a boat, which
he drew into the shore and entered with his companion, taking him to a
yacht which lay two hundred and forty yards from the shore, in the
padlocked cabin of which was a boat hook. The padlock was unfastened,
the boat hook taken, and they proceeded by the boat directly to where
the young man lay.
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