forward to re-attach itself again, his eyes starting from his head, his
face bloodless with exertion and twisted as fearfully as were his limbs,
but upon his lips a smile of resolution, of indomitable assurance.

Onward they went--a huddled mass of humanity, literate and illiterate,
of all ages, of all conditions, and none laughed, none grinned, none
smiled, none spoke--all that was past. They stopped, they moved
again--as the Flopper stopped and moved. Occasionally a child cried
out--occasionally there came a discordant, racking cough--that was all.

Tenser grew the very atmosphere they breathed--heavier upon them fell
the sense of something almost supernatural, beyond the human and the
finite. Skeptic and faint believer, sinner, Christian and scoffer, they
were all alike now in the presence of a faith whose evidence was before
them in harrowing vividness, in the torment and agony of a fellow
creature who sought again through faith a restoration to the image of
his kind. There was no creed, no school of ethical belief, no
conflicting orthodoxy to quibble over, no ground on which atheist and
theologian even might stand apart--there was only _faith_--a faith whose
trappings none might take issue with, for it was naked faith and the
trappings were stripped from it--it was faith in its very essence,
boundless, utter, simple, limitless, staggering, appalling them.

Its consummation? That was another thing--a thing that in the presence
of such faith as this brought human pity, sympathy and sorrow to its
full, brought dread and terror. Faith such as this they had never
conceived; faith such as this, if it was to prove a shattered thing, was
for its exponent to drink the very dregs of misery and despair--and
yet, rising above that possibility, flinging grim challenge at their
doubts, stood this very faith, mighty in itself, perfect in its