sob and these footsteps which David heard.

Plunging into the depths of the forest as a wounded animal would have
done, he cast himself upon the bosom of the earth at the foot of a great
tree, to find solitude and consolation.

There are wounds in the soul too deep to be healed by the balm which
exudes from the visible elements of Nature. There are longings and
aspirations which the palpable and audible cannot satisfy. Not what he
sees and touches, but what he hopes and trusts, can save man in these
dark moments from the final despair and terror of existence.

Upon such an hour as this the lumberman had fallen. God had thrust
Himself upon his attention. Instead of being compelled to seek a
religious experience, he found it impossible to escape it.

The religious experiences of men in any such epoch possess a certain
general similarity. Sometimes thought, sometimes action and sometimes
emotion furnish the all-pervasive element. Whatever this peculiar
characteristic may be, its manifestations are always most vivid and
violent in ignorant periods, and along the uncultivated frontiers of
advancing civilization. In those rude days and regions, the victims (if
one might say so) of religion experienced nervous excitations and
emotional transports which not infrequently terminated in convulsions.
Days and nights, weeks and even months, were often spent by them in
struggles which were always painful and often terrible.

Andy McFarlane had often enough witnessed and despised these
experiences; but through those almost inexorable laws of association and
imitation, they were more than likely to reproduce themselves in him.
And so indeed they did. Under the influence of these new thoughts that
had seized him with such power, he writhed in agony on the ground. A
profound "conviction of sin" took possession of his soul and he felt
himself to be hopelessly and forever lost. That hell at which he had so
often scoffed suddenly opened its jaws beneath his feet, and although he
shuddered at the thought of being engulfed in its horrors, he felt that
such a doom would be the just desert of a life like his.

Hours passed in which his calmest thoughts were those of complete
bewilderment and helplessness, and in which he seemed to himself to be
floating upon a wide and shoreless sea, or wandering in a pathless
wilderness or winging his way like a lost bird through the trackless
heavens. However large an element of unreality and absurdity t