ed the noise of the waters the cloud had left
behind. The sun had kept on his journey; the storm had been no
disaster to him; and now he was a long way down the west, and
Twilight, in her grey cloak, would soon be tracking him from the
east, like sorrow dogging delight. Gibbie, wet and cold, began to
think of the cottage where he had been so kindly received, of the
friendly face of its mistress, and her care of the lamb. It was not
that he wanted to eat. He did not even imagine more eating, for
never in his life had he eaten twice of the same charity in the same
day. What he wanted was to find some dry hole in the mountain, and
sleep as near the cottage as he could. So he rose and set out. But
he lost his way; came upon one precipice after another, down which
only a creeping thing could have gone; was repeatedly turned aside
by torrents and swampy places; and when the twilight came, was still
wandering upon the mountain. At length he found, as he thought, the
burn along whose bank he had ascended in the morning, and followed
it towards the valley, looking out for the friendly cottage. But
the first indication of abode he saw, was the wall of the grounds of
the house through whose gate he had looked in the morning. He was
then a long way from the cottage, and not far from the farm; and the
best thing he could do was to find again the barn where he had slept
so well the night before. This was not very difficult even in the
dusky night. He skirted the wall, came to his first guide, found
and crossed the valley-stream, and descended it until he thought he
recognized the slope of clover down which he had run in the morning.
He ran up the brae, and there were the solemn cones of the
corn-ricks between him and the sky! A minute more and he had crept
through the cat-hole, and was feeling about in the dark barn.
Happily the heap of straw was not yet removed. Gibbie shot into it
like a mole, and burrowed to the very centre, there coiled himself
up, and imagined himself lying in the heart of the rock on which he
sat during the storm, and listening to the thunder winds over his
head. The fancy enticed the sleep which before was ready enough to
come, and he was soon far stiller than Ariel in the cloven pine of
Sycorax.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CEILING.

He might have slept longer the next morning, for there was no
threshing to wake him, in spite of the cocks in the yard that made
it their business to rouse sleep