crushing each other under falling cliffs; for heaven is a place where
one can fight for ever without hurting. Smith suddenly remembered how
happy he had been as a child, rolling about on the safe sandhills around
Conway.

Right above Smith's head, higher than the cross of St. Paul's, but
curving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a cavernous
crag of snow. A hundred feet below him, like a landscape seen from a
balloon, lay snowy flats as white and as far away. He saw a little
boy stagger, with many catastrophic slides, to that toppling peak; and
seizing another little boy by the leg, send him flying away down to the
distant silver plains. There he sank and vanished in the snow as if in
the sea; but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep once
more, rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at last,
which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy and
the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale. The other
boy also sank like a stone, and also rose again like a bird, but Smith
had no leisure to concern himself with this. For the collapse of that
celestial crest had left him standing solitary in the sky on a peak like
a church spire.

He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below, and he
knew by their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump. Then
for the first time he knew the nature of faith, as he had just known
the fierce nature of charity. Or rather for the second time, for he
remembered one moment when he had known faith before. It was n when his
father had taught him to swim, and he had believed he could float on
water not only against reason, but (what is so much harder) against
instinct. Then he had trusted water; now he must trust air.

He jumped. He went through air and then through snow with the same
blinding swiftness. But as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullet
he seemed to learn a million things and to learn them all too fast.
He knew that the whole world is a snowball, and that all the stars are
snowballs. He knew that no man will be fit for heaven till he loves
solid whiteness as a little boy loves a ball of snow.

He sank and sank and sank... and then, as usually happens in such cases,
woke up, with a start--in the street. True, he was taken up for a common
drunk, but (if you properly appreciate his conversion) you will realize
that he did not mind; since the crime of drunkenness is i