ind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these
things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. Yea,
the Presence was in his very soul, else he could never have rejoiced
in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still he knew not the
Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his
knowledge--even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and
flower and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in
him, as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the
child had rejoiced. The stars came out, to Gibbie the heavenly
herd, feeding at night, and gathering gold in the blue pastures. He
saw them, looking up from the grass where he had thrown himself to
gaze more closely at the daisies; and the sleep that pressed down
his eyelids seemed to descend from the spaces between the stars.
But it was too cold that night to sleep in the fields, when he knew
where to find warmth. Like a fox into his hole, the child would
creep into the corner where God had stored sleep for him: back he
went to the barn, gently trotting, and wormed himself through the
cat-hole.

The straw was gone! But he remembered the hay. And happily, for he
was tired, there stood the ladder against the loft. Up he went, nor
turned aside to the cheese; but sleep was common property still. He
groped his way forward through the dark loft until he found the hay,
when at once he burrowed into it like a sand-fish into the wet sand.
All night the white horse, a glory vanished in the dark, would be
close to him, behind the thin partition of boards. He could hear
his very breath as he slept, and to the music of it, audible sign of
companionship, he fell fast asleep, and slept until the waking
horses woke him.

CHAPTER XVI.

APPRENTICESHIP.

He scrambled out on the top of the hay, and looked down on the
beautiful creature below him, dawning radiant again with the
morning, as it issued undimmed from the black bosom of the night.
He was not, perhaps, just so well groomed as white steed might be;
it was not a stable where they kept a blue-bag for their grey
horses; but to Gibbie's eyes he was so pure, that he began, for the
first time in his life, to doubt whether he was himself quite as
clean as he ought to be. He did not know, but he would make an
experiment for information when he got down to the burn. Meantime
was there nothing he could do for the splendid creature? From
above, leaning over, h