lenty of air to flow and eddy between. Over a low
wall of unmortared stones, he entered their ranks: above him, as he
looked up from their broad base, they ascended huge as pyramids, and
peopled the waste air with giant forms. How warm it was in the
round-winding paths amongst the fruitful piles--tombs these, no
cenotaphs! He wandered about them, now in a dusky yellow gloom, and
now in the cold blue moonlight, which they seemed to warm. At
length he discovered that the huge things were flanked on one side
by a long low house, in which there was a door, horizontally divided
into two parts. Gibbie would fain have got in, to try whether the
place was good for sleep; but he found both halves fast. In the
lower half, however, he spied a hole, which, though not so large,
reminded him of the entrance to the kennel of his dog host; but
alas! it had a door too, shut from the inside. There might be some
way of opening it. He felt about, and soon discovered that it was a
sliding valve, which he could push to either side. It was, in fact,
the cat's door, specially constructed for her convenience of
entrance and exit. For the cat is the guardian of the barn; the
grain which tempts the rats and mice is no temptation to her; the
rats and mice themselves are; upon them she executes justice, and
remains herself an incorruptible, because untempted, therefore a
respectable member of the farm-community--only the dairy door must
be kept shut; that has no cat-wicket in it.

The hole was a small one, but tempting to the wee baronet; he might
perhaps be able to squeeze himself through. He tried and succeeded,
though with some little difficulty. The moon was there before him,
shining through a pane or two of glass over the door, and by her
light on the hard brown clay floor, Gibbie saw where he was, though
if he had been told he was in the barn, he would neither have felt
nor been at all the wiser. It was a very old-fashioned barn. About
a third of it was floored with wood--dark with age--almost as brown
as the clay--for threshing upon with flails. At that labour two men
had been busy during the most of the preceding day, and that was
how, in the same end of the barn, rose a great heap of oat-straw,
showing in the light of the moon like a mound of pale gold. Had
Gibbie had any education in the marvellous, he might now, in the
midnight and moonlight, have well imagined himself in some
treasure-house of the gnomes. What he saw