square from a circle pronounce upon the study of
mathematics.

The next morning rose brilliant--an ideal summer day. He would not go
yet; he would spend one day more in the place. He opened his valise to
get some lighter garments. His eye fell on a New Testament. Dr. Anderson
had put it there. He had never opened it yet, and now he let it lie. Its
time had not yet come. He went out.

Walking up the edge of the valley, he came upon a little stream whose
talk he had heard for some hundred yards. It flowed through a grassy
hollow, with steeply sloping sides. Water is the same all the world
over; but there was more than water here to bring his childhood back
to Falconer. For at the spot where the path led him down to the burn, a
little crag stood out from the bank,--a gray stone like many he knew on
the stream that watered the valley of Rothieden: on the top of the stone
grew a little heather; and beside it, bending towards the water, was a
silver birch. He sat down on the foot of the rock, shut in by the high
grassy banks from the gaze of the awful mountains. The sole unrest was
the run of the water beside him, and it sounded so homely, that he
began to jabber Scotch to it. He forgot that this stream was born in the
clouds, far up where that peak rose into the air behind him; he did
not know that a couple of hundred yards from where he sat, it tumbled
headlong into the valley below: with his country's birch-tree beside
him, and the rock crowned with its tuft of heather over his head, the
quiet as of a Sabbath afternoon fell upon him--that quiet which is the
one altogether lovely thing in the Scotch Sabbath--and once more the
words arose in his mind, 'My peace I give unto you.'

Now he fell a-thinking what this peace could be. And it came into his
mind as he thought, that Jesus had spoken in another place about giving
rest to those that came to him, while here he spoke about 'my peace.'
Could this my mean a certain kind of peace that the Lord himself
possessed? Perhaps it was in virtue of that peace, whatever it was, that
he was the Prince of Peace. Whatever peace he had must be the highest
and best peace--therefore the one peace for a man to seek, if indeed, as
the words of the Lord seemed to imply, a man was capable of possessing
it. He remembered the New Testament in his box, and, resolving to try
whether he could not make something more out of it, went back to the inn
quieter in heart than since he left his home. In t