One day the stream of water by which the seed was carried along sank suddenly--whirling down a funnel in the ground. Slowly the grey light of day grew less as the seed dived deeper and deeper, till in absolute darkness it was rushing madly down the water-spout. Hoarse bellowings resounded about its long subterranean voyage, asserting themselves above the stifled noises of the passage of the buried river through the bowels of the earth. For weeks and months the pine-kernel revolved in these invisible currents, at times slipping slowly along the twisting flow, at other times hurled forward at a dizzy speed in the dwelling coolness of the under-ground. Suddenly the booming of the flood deepened. A hesitating cautious light came trembling down the waves, and with a huge guggling the seed found itself thrown out into a greenish mass of translucent water, the volume of a river which now took charge of its further course, and in whose stream it long drifted, while the sun gilded the changing surface or the moon turned it all to silver. The tiny seed seemed lost in time, swallowed up in space, as it floated on top of the water or sank into its depth. The contrasts were overwhelming, when the insignificant grain was set beside the river which carried it along, beside the wide champaigns of the two banks, beside the unplumbed void above, in whose pale-blue transparency some far grey and white clouds were fading or floating. How small it looked so set in infinite space! and yet the pine-kernel had its own part to play, and of the thousands of interacting forces in earth and heaven some were specially appointed to fulfil its destiny. Where did it go in this great smooth-running river? How was it that the immensities among which it wandered did not blot out its faint existence? Had the all-seeing Eye really appointed each one of the many incidents which marked its start in life? Can we, in view of this case, believe that everything has been fore-ordained since the beginning of time (which has never been), and is ordained to the end of time (which also will never be)? No doubt there are the same laws for beings and for things, for constellations of dazzling size as for atoms too small to see, laws which operate in a like spirit and entail like inevitable consequences of related sense. Worlds and beings, objective things and abstractions of thought and instinct all run a similar course of birth, climax, and decline. They begin in nameless processes, develop in phases according to their kinds, and end one day to make room for other transformations equally indescribable.