VI 
THE STILL SMALL VOICE 
NE summer day, while I was walking along the 
country road on the farm where I was born, a 
section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more 
than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. 
Amid the general stillness and immobility about me, 
the effect was quite startling. The question at once 
arose in my mind as to just what happened to that 
bit of stone wall at that particular moment to cause 
it to fall. Maybe the slight vibration imparted to 
the ground by my tread caused the minute shifting 
of forces that brought it down. But the time was 
ripe; a long, slow, silent process of decay and disin- 
tegration, or a shifting of the points of bearing amid 
the fragments of stone by the action of the weather, 
culminated at that instant, and the wall fell. It was 
the sudden summing-up of half a century or more 
of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A 
grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long 
years, and gravity did the rest. It was as when the 
keystone of an arch crumbles or weakens to the last 
particle, and the arch suddenly collapses. 
The same thing happened in the case of the large 
spruce-tree that fell as our steamer passed near the 
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