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.
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