be barked at.
Gibbie was a stranger, and therefore as a stranger Oscar gave him
welcome--now and then stooping to lick the little brown feet that
had wandered so far.

Like all wild creatures, Gibbie ate fast, and had finished
everything set before him ere the woman had done feeding the lamb.
Without a notion of the rudeness of it, his heart full of gentle
gratitude, he rose and left the cottage. When Janet turned from her
shepherding, there sat Oscar looking up at the empty chair.

"What's come o' the laddie?" she said to the dog, who answered with
a low whine, half-regretful, half-interrogative. It may be he was
only asking, like Esau, if there was no residuum of blessing for him
also; but perhaps he too was puzzled what to conclude about the boy.
Janet hastened to the door, but already Gibbie's nimble feet
refreshed to the point of every toe with the food he had just
swallowed, had borne him far up the hill, behind the cottage, so
that she could not get a glimpse of him. Thoughtfully she returned,
and thoughtfully removed the remnants of the meal. She would then
have resumed her Bible, but her hospitality had rendered it
necessary that she should put on her girdle--not a cincture of
leather upon her body, but a disc of iron on the fire, to bake
thereon cakes ere her husband's return. It was a simple enough
process, for the oat-meal wanted nothing but water and fire; but her
joints had not yet got rid of the winter's rheumatism, and the
labour of the baking was the hardest part of the sacrifice of her
hospitality. To many it is easy to give what they have, but the
offering of weariness and pain is never easy. They are indeed a
true salt to salt sacrifices withal. That it was the last of her
meal till her youngest boy should bring her a bag on his back from
the mill the next Saturday, made no point in her trouble.

When at last she had done, and put the things away, and swept up the
hearth, she milked the ewe, sent her out to nibble, took her Bible,
and sat down once more to read. The lamb lay at her feet, with his
little head projecting from the folds of her new flannel petticoat;
and every time her eye fell from the book upon the lamb, she felt as
if somehow the lamb was the boy that had eaten of her bread and
drunk of her milk. After she had read a while, there came a change,
and the lamb seemed the Lord himself, both lamb and shepherd, who
had come to claim her hospitality. Then, divinely invaded wi