It deepened and deepened.
Surely it would deepen to a voice!--it was about to speak! It was as if a great single thought was the substance of the silence, and was all over and around him, and closer to him than his clothes, than his body, than his hands.

I am describing the indescribable, and compelled to make it too definite for belief.

In colder speech, an experience had come to the child; a link in the chain of his development glided over the windlass of his uplifting; a change passed upon him.

In after years, when Gibbie had the idea of God, when he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence, to believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs--as often as the thought of God came to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of Glashgar.
As he sat, with his eyes on the peak he had just chosen from the rest as the loftiest of all within his sight, he saw a cloud begin to grow upon it.

The cloud grew, and gathered, and descended, covering its sides as it went, until the whole was hidden.