n, followed by a frightful
roaring and hurling, as of mingled water and stones; and on the side
of the mountain beneath him he saw what, through the mist, looked
like a cloud of smoke or dust rising to a height. He darted towards
it. As he drew nearer, the cloud seemed to condense, and presently
he saw plainly enough that it was a great column of water shooting
up and out from the face of the mountain. It sank and rose again,
with the alternation of a huge pulse: the mountain was cracked, and
through the crack, with every throb of its heart, the life-blood of
the great hull of the world seemed beating out. Already it had
scattered masses of gravel on all sides, and down the hill a river
was shooting in sheer cataract, raving and tearing, and carrying
stones and rocks with it like foam. Still and still it pulsed and
rushed and ran, born, like another Xanthus, a river full-grown, from
the heart of the mountain.

Suddenly Gibbie, in the midst of his astonishment and awful delight,
noted the path of the new stream, and from his knowledge of the face
of the mountain, perceived that its course was direct for the
cottage. Down the hill he shot after it, as if it were a wild beast
that his fault had freed from its cage. He was not terrified. One
believing like him in the perfect Love and perfect Will of a Father
of men, as the fact of facts, fears nothing. Fear is faithlessness.
But there is so little that is worthy the name of faith, that such
a confidence will appear to most not merely incredible but
heartless. The Lord himself seems not to have been very hopeful
about us, for he said, When the Son of man cometh, shall he find
faith on the earth? A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above
fear. It is in the cracks, crannies, and gulfy faults of our
belief, the gaps that are not faith, that the snow of apprehension
settles, and the ice of unkindness forms.

The torrent had already worn for itself a channel: what earth there
was, it had swept clean away to the rock, and the loose stones it
had thrown up aside, or hurled with it in its headlong course. But
as Gibbie bounded along, following it with a speed almost equal to
its own, he was checked in the midst of his hearty haste by the
sight, a few yards away, of another like terror--another torrent
issuing from the side of the hill, and rushing to swell the valley
stream. Another and another he saw, with growing wonder, as he ran;
before he reached home he