nd
in his ears the sound of many waters. It was morning. He rose,
and, dressing hastily, opened the door. What a picture of grey
storm rose outspread before him! The wind fiercely invaded the
cottage, thick charged with water-drops, and stepping out he shut
the door in haste, lest it should blow upon the old people in bed
and wake them. He could not see far on any side, for the rain that
fell, and the mist and steam that rose, upon which the wind seemed
to have no power; but wherever he did see, there water was running
down. Up the mountain he went--he could hardly have told why.
Once, for a moment, as he ascended, the veil of the vapour either
rose, or was torn asunder, and he saw the great wet gleam of the
world below. By the time he reached the top, it was as light as it
was all the day; but it was with a dull yellow glare, as if the sun
were obscured by the smoke and vaporous fumes of a burning world
which the rain had been sent to quench. It was a wild, hopeless
scene--as if God had turned his face away from the world, and all
Nature was therefore drowned in tears--no Rachel weeping for her
children, but the whole creation crying for the Father, and refusing
to be comforted. Gibbie stood gazing and thinking. Did God like to
look at the storm he made? If Jesus did, would he have left it all
and gone to sleep, when the wind and waves were howling, and
flinging the boat about like a toy between them? He must have been
tired, surely! With what? Then first Gibbie saw that perhaps it
tired Jesus to heal people; that every time what cured man or woman
was life that went out of him, and that he missed it, perhaps--not
from his heart, but from his body; and if it were so, then it was no
wonder if he slept in the midst of a right splendid storm. And upon
that Gibbie remembered what St. Matthew says just before he tells
about the storm--that "he cast out the spirits with his word, and
healed all that were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities,
and bare our sicknesses."

That moment it seemed as if he must be himself in some wave-tossed
boat, and not upon a mountain of stone, for Glashgar gave a great
heave under him, then rocked and shook from side to side a little,
and settled down so still and steady, that motion and the mountain
seemed again two ideas that never could be present together in any
mind. The next instant came an explosio