He knew well the profoundity of the rocky abyss that yawned in obscurity below him, and he heard the slow gurgle of the burn as it chafed against the stones that barred its downward passage, and, mechanically, as one in a dream who fears to fall, he strove to sway his body upward, but could find no rest for his footsteps, and felt that the birch branch to which he clung was gradually but surely--rending! He had no terror of death in itself--none of death in the battlefield, as we have shown; but from such a fate as this he shrank; his soul seemed to die within him, and with every respiration there seemed to come the agony of a whole lifetime. His nerve was gone, and no marvel that it was so. He might escape instant death; but not the most dreadful mutilation; and, sooth to say, he dreaded that a thousand times more than death. One glance downward into that dark and misty chasm was in itself a summons to death, and he knew well the terrible bed of stones and boulders that lay below. He became paralyzed--paralyzed with a great and stunning fear. The rending of the branch continued; his arms were waxing faint and strained; his fingers feeble; and it was only a question of moments between time and eternity--fall--fall he must--how far--how deep down--the depth he had forgotten. The suspense was horrible; yet it was full of the dire certainty of a dreadful end. Every act and scene of his past life came surging up to memory--the memory of less than a minute, now. The branch parted; but, still grasping it, down he went whizzing through the mist--there was a stunning crash as he fell first on a ledge of rock and then into the stream's stony bed below, and then sight and sense and sound passed away from him! How long he lay there he knew not. After a time consciousness returned, but he felt himself incapable of action--of motion--almost of thinking. The ledge or shelf of rock, which was covered by soft turf, had first received him, and thus broken the fall, which ended, we have said, in the bed of the stream, in which he was partially immersed from the waist downwards; but whether his limbs were broken or dislocated he knew not then, and there he lay helpless, with the cold current trickling past and partly over him, the rocks towering sharply and steeply up on either side of him to where their summits were hidden in the masses of eddying mist, that now began to rise and sink as the wind increased and the afternoon began to close. How long might he lie there undiscovered in that desolate spot, which he knew so few approached? How long would he last, suffering as he did then? And was a miserable death, such as this--there and amid such surroundings--to be the end of his young life, with all its bright hopes and loving aspirations for the future? Cold though he began to feel--icy cold--hot bead drops suffused his temples at the idea, and at all his fancy began to picture, and more than once a weak cry for aid escaped him.