n-ash, or a stunted fir-tree,
looking like a wizard child, hung over the stream. Its banks were
mainly of rock and heather, but now and then a small patch of
cultivation intervened. Gibbie had no thought that he was gradually
leaving the abodes of men behind him; he knew no reason why in
ascending things should change, and be no longer as in plainer ways.
For what he knew, there might be farm after farm, up and up for
ever, to the gates of heaven. But it would no longer have troubled
him greatly to leave all houses behind him for a season. A great
purple foxglove could do much now--just at this phase of his story,
to make him forget--not the human face divine, but the loss of it.
A lark aloft in the blue, from whose heart, as from a fountain
whose roots were lost in the air, its natural source, issued, not a
stream, but an ever spreading lake of song, was now more to him than
the memory of any human voice he had ever heard, except his father's
and Sambo's. But he was not yet quite out and away from the
dwellings of his kind.

I may as well now make the attempt to give some idea of Gibbie's
appearance, as he showed after so long wandering. Of dress he had
hardly enough left to carry the name. Shoes, of course, he had
none. Of the shape of trousers there remained nothing, except the
division before and behind in the short petticoat to which they were
reduced; and those rudimentary divisions were lost in the multitude
of rents of equal apparent significance. He had never, so far as he
knew, had a shirt upon his body; and his sole other garment was a
jacket, so much too large for him, that to retain the use of his
hands he had folded back the sleeves quite to his elbows. Thus
reversed they became pockets, the only ones he had, and in them he
stowed whatever provisions were given him of which he could not make
immediate use--porridge and sowens and mashed potatoes included:
they served him, in fact, like the first of the stomachs of those
animals which have more than one--concerning which animals, by the
way, I should much like to know what they were in "Pythagoras'
time." His head had plentiful protection in his own natural
crop--had never either had or required any other. That would have
been of the gold order, had not a great part of its colour been
sunburnt, rained, and frozen out of it. All ways it pointed, as if
surcharged with electric fluid, crowning him with a wildness which
was in amusing contrast wi