Grand Rapids Morning Telegram

SHE SCARED A CROWD.

Playing on a Ledge, Four Stories from the Ground.

[Chicago Herald.]

There was an exciting scene at the corner of LaSalle and Madison streets yesterday afternoon—a scene that for a short moment of dreadful suspense made every one in the great throng which passes that crossing stop. Way up in the fourth floor of the Major Block little child, a pretty girl of perhaps three or four years, toddled playfully on a narrow window ledge, perfectly unconscious of the appalling danger of its position. The windows of most of the offices were open and unprovided with screens. The little one was, perhaps, left alone in the office into which the window opened, that of the law firm of G. A. Hawley and N. H. Hanchett. Perhaps she had been left seated in a chair close by the window, and, attracted by the din and noise of the ever-changing scene below, had crawled upon the window-sill. About two feet below the latter a narrow stone cornice presented a foothold, and upon that cornice the little one had climbed, running in aimless child's play from right to left between the two columns which support one of the ornamental stone arches on the front wall.

The crowd below was horror-stricken.

First one pedestrian had noticed it, then another, and in a few minutes there were several hundred people, all spell-bound.

Fortunately, as if by common instinct nobody called to the little one from below—it would have been death. But when she bent across the cornice, with her body on the latter and her hands on the window ledge, kicking in sheer delight with both feet into space, nearly one hundred feet from the ground, there were suppressed cries of agony. All this happened quicker than it can be told or read—perhaps it lasted only a minute, but it was an unspeakably long time for the agonized spectators. A dozen people ran up-stairs to rescue the little one from its perilous position. They could not have been half way when a man appeared at the window, who evidently had come from an adjoining room. To snatch the child from almost certain death and cover its wondering little face with passionate kisses was the work of an instant. The crowd below at once comprehended the situation and dispersed with a lusty cheer.