en made the small acquaintance--and that not without
terror. The sea was as different from the city as the air into
which he had looked up at night--too different to compare against it
and feel the contrast; on neither could he set foot; in neither
could he be required to live and act--as now in this waste of
enterable and pervious extent.

Its own horror drove the vision away, and Gibbie saw the world
again--saw, but did not love it. The sun seemed but to have looked
up to mock him and go down again, for he had crossed the crack, and
was behind a thick mass of cloud; a cold damp wind, spotted with
sparkles of rain, blew fitfully from the east; the low bushes among
which he sat, sent forth a chill sighing all about him, as they
sifted the wind into sound; the smell of the damp earth was strange
to him--he did not know the freshness, the new birth of which it
breathed; below him the gloomy river, here deep, smooth, moody,
sullen, there puckered with the grey ripples of a shallow laughter
under the cold breeze, went flowing heedless to the city. There
only was--or had been, friendliness, comfort, home! This was
emptiness--the abode of things, not beings. Yet never once did
Gibbie think of returning to the city. He rose and wandered up the
wide road along the river bank, farther and farther from it--his
only guide the words of his father, "Up Daurside;" his sole comfort
the feeling of having once more to do with his father so long
departed, some relation still with the paradise of his old world.
Along cultivated fields and copses on the one side, and on the
other a steep descent to the river, covered here and there with
trees, but mostly with rough grass and bushes and stones, he
followed the king's highway. There were buttercups and plenty of
daisies within his sight--primroses, too, on the slope beneath; but
he did not know flowers, and his was not now the mood for
discovering what they were. The exercise revived him, and he began
to be hungry. But how could there be anything to eat in the desert,
inhospitable succession of trees and fields and hedges, through
which the road wound endlessly along, like a dead street, having
neither houses nor paving stones? Hunger, however, was far less
enfeebling to Gibbie than to one accustomed to regular meals, and he
was in no anxiety about either when or what he should eat.

The morning advanced, and by-and-by he began to meet a
fellow-creature now and then upon the roa