The Evening Statesman

BOY TUMBLES OVER A CLIFF.
One of Three Young Skaters Caught on Edge of Cliff.
"The longest way 'round is often the safest way home."-Old Adage.

NEW YORK, Dec. 27.-A party of three boy skaters, returning from Central Lake, stopped to scale the forbidding and jagged front of old Eagle Rock, near Orange, N. J., a feat that has cost many a life-and as a result Harold Jackson, a thirteen-year-old lad, of No. 29 Chapel street, lies at his home suffering from injuries that are critical; his brother Herbert, eleven years old, is ill from cold and exposure, and Leo Cruse, eleven years old, is threatened with pneumonia.

The lads had a narrow and providential escape from instant death. They had been of a skating party that just at dusk started for home down the tortuous road that skirts Eagle Rock hill.

Harold thought to make better time by going down the fields-"cross lots"-and scaling the cliff. Herbert and the Cruse boy followed.

The night come upon them faster than they expected as they reached the cliff's edge. In the uncertain light they groped their way. Suddenly, without warning, the ground under them gave away and they tumbled fifteen or twenty feet to a projecting ledge of stone. They neither could climb backward nor forward. They called for help, but none went to them.

Then Harold declared he would crawl down the cliff. He tried to and fell forty feet into a chasm. The younger lads, left alone, screamed for help. Some one heard them and cast them a rope and they were pulled to the top of the cliff, shivering and frightened.

Then the searching party went after Harold. He was found, unconscious and bleeding, at the foot of the cliff. He is badly injured.