n
altogether new and strange feeling; yet gratitude to his master had
but turned itself round, and become tenderness to his pupil.

After Donal left him in the field, and while he was ministering,
first to his beasts and then to himself, Gibbie lay on the grass, as
happy as child could well be. A loving hand laid on his feet or
legs would have found them like ice; but where was the matter so
long as he never thought of them? He could have supped a huge
bicker of sowens, and eaten a dozen potatoes; but of what mighty
consequence is hunger, so long as it neither absorbs the thought,
nor causes faintness? The sun, however, was going down behind a
great mountain, and its huge shadow, made of darkness, and haunted
with cold, came sliding across the river, and over valley and field,
nothing staying its silent wave, until it covered Gibbie with the
blanket of the dark, under which he could not long forget that he
was in a body to which cold is unfriendly. At the first breath of
the night-wind that came after the shadow, he shivered, and starting
to his feet, began to trot, increasing his speed until he was
scudding up and down the field like a wild thing of the night, whose
time was at hand, waiting until the world should lie open to him.
Suddenly he perceived that the daisies, which all day long had been
full-facing the sun, like true souls confessing to the father of
them, had folded their petals together to points, and held them like
spear-heads tipped with threatening crimson, against the onset of
the night and her shadows, while within its white cone each folded
in the golden heart of its life, until the great father should
return, and, shaking the wicked out of the folds of the night,
render the world once more safe with another glorious day. Gibbie
gazed and wondered; and while he gazed--slowly, glidingly, back to
his mind came the ghost-mother of the ballad, and in every daisy he
saw her folding her neglected orphans to her bosom, while the
darkness and the misery rolled by defeated. He wished he knew a
ghost that would put her arms round him. He must have had a mother
once, he supposed, but he could not remember her, and of course she
must have forgotten him. He did not know that about him were folded
the everlasting arms of the great, the one Ghost, which is the Death
of death--the life and soul of all things and all thoughts. The
Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only
as the w