passed some six or eight, and had begun to
think whether a second deluge of the whole world might not be at
hand, commencing this time with Scotland. Two of them joined the
one he was following, and he had to cross them as he could; the
others he saw near and farther off--one foaming deliverance after
another, issuing from the entrails of the mountain, like imprisoned
demons, that, broken from their bonds, ran to ravage the world with
the accumulated hate of dreariest centuries. Now and then a huge
boulder, loosened from its bed by the trail of this or that watery
serpent, would go rolling, leaping, bounding down the hill before
him, and just in time he escaped one that came springing after him
as if it were a living thing that wanted to devour him. Nor was
Glashgar the only torrent-bearing mountain of Gormgarnet that day,
though the rain prevented Gibbie from seeing anything of what the
rest of them were doing. The fountains of the great deep were
broken up, and seemed rushing together to drown the world. And
still the wind was raging, and the rain tumbling to the earth,
rather in sheets than in streams.

Gibbie at length forsook the bank of the new torrent to take the
nearest way home, and soon reached the point whence first, returning
in that direction, he always looked to see the cottage. For a
moment he was utterly bewildered: no cottage was to be seen. From
the top of the rock against which it was built, shot the whole mass
of the water he had been pursuing, now dark with stones and gravel,
now grey with foam, or glassy in the lurid light.

"O Jesus Christ!" he cried, and darted to the place. When he came
near, to his amazement there stood the little house unharmed, the
very centre of the cataract! For a few yards on the top of the
rock, the torrent had a nearly horizontal channel, along which it
rushed with unabated speed to the edge, and thence shot clean over
the cottage, dropping only a dribble of rain on the roof from the
underside of its half-arch. The garden ground was gone, swept clean
from the bare rock, which made a fine smooth shoot for the water a
long distance in front. He darted through the drizzle and spray,
reached the door, and lifted the hatch. The same moment he heard
Janet's voice in joyful greeting.

"Noo, noo! come awa', laddie," she said. "Wha wad hae thoucht we wad
hae to lea' the rock to win oot o' the water? We're but waitin' you
to gang.--Come, Robert, we'll awa' do