It was a sunny day in early spring. The snow and ice had begun to melt, crows had returned from the south and were proclaiming in hoarse cries that winter would soon be gone, while the woodpecker's tapping told out his joy at the prospect of summer's approach.
Mr. Watt and his son Jack had gone to the woods with the horses and sleigh to load some logs from a skidway to take to the mill. The pile was quite high and still covered with ice and snow. A number of the heavy birch logs had been rolled down for loading, and Mr. Watt was standing between two of them, his back to the skidway.
Suddenly, without warning, the logs in the pile began to slide down, loosened by the sun's warm rays from the ice that held them. Jack called to his father to jump, but it was too late. With a sickening thud the logs rolled against one of the two between which Mr. Watt was standing. At the moment he had one foot up on the other log. The force of the fall caused the two logs to roll together, thus pinning the other leg between them and breaking the bone in such a manner that the limb had, later, to be amputated.
Jack sprang over with a canthook and released the injured man, laying him gently on the snow while he ran for the horses and the sleigh.
Now, what were Mr. Watt's thoughts as he lay there writhing in agony?
He afterward told a neighbor that, as he lay there, his whole life flashed before him.
He saw himself a lost, guilty sinner bound for hell. The thought came to him that, had he been killed, his would have been a lost eternity. He thought of others who had been suddenly snatched away from this life, and he shuddered at the awful solemnity of thus going unprepared to meet God. The agony he was enduring made him think of One who had borne the anguish of the Cross.
For the first time in his life he realized that those sufferings were for him. There, as he lay, he acknowledged that dying Man on the Cross to be his Savior. It was not long before Jack returned with the sleigh, but in those few moments this precious soul passed "from death unto life," saved by believing in. that work accomplished on the Cross for him.
Later, when visited in the hospital, he wept—not for his own sufferings, but for what his Lord endured for him when hanging on that shameful cross. "Oh those spikes!" he would cry, "Oh those spikes!”
Reader, has it ever touched your heart that Christ should suffer, bleed, and die for you? Have you acknowledged that this sacrifice was for you? Surely God's ways are past finding out. This accident was used of Him to bring this dear man to Himself, and he lived to prove the reality of his conversion.