reap the benefits
of punishment. But of vice and loss, of house and fathers and
punishment, Gibbie had no smallest cognition. His history was about
him and in him, yet of it all he suspected nothing. It would have
made little difference to him if he had known it all; he would none
the less have accepted everything that came, just as part of the
story in which he found himself.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE PUNISHMENT.

The house he was approaching, had a little the look of a prison. Of
the more ancient portion the windows were very small, and every
corner had a turret with a conical cap-roof. That part was all
rough-cast, therefore grey, as if with age. The more modern part
was built of all kinds of hard stone, roughly cloven or blasted from
the mountain and its boulders. Granite red and grey, blue
whinstone, yellow ironstone, were all mingled anyhow, fitness of
size and shape alone regarded in their conjunctions; but the result
as to colour was rather pleasing than otherwise, and Gibbie regarded
it with some admiration. Nor, although he had received from Fergus
such convincing proof that he was regarded as a culprit, had he any
dread of evil awaiting him. The highest embodiment of the law with
which he had acquaintance was the police, and from not one of them
in all the city had he ever had a harsh word; his conscience was as
void of offence as ever it had been, and the law consequently,
notwithstanding the threats of Fergus, had for him no terrors.

The laird was an early riser, and therefore regarded the mere
getting up early as a virtue, altogether irrespective of how the
time, thus redeemed, as he called it, was spent. This morning, as
it turned out, it would have been better spent in sleep. He was
talking to his gamekeeper, a heavy-browed man, by the coach-house
door, when Fergus appeared holding the dwindled brownie by the huge
collar of his tatters. A more innocent-looking malefactor sure
never appeared before awful Justice! Only he was in rags, and there
are others besides dogs whose judgments go by appearance. Mr.
Galbraith was one of them, and smiled a grim, an ugly smile.

"So this is your vaunted brownie, Mr. Duff!" he said, and stood
looking down upon Gibbie, as if in his small person he saw
superstition at the point of death, mocked thither by the arrows of
his contemptuous wit.

"It's all the brownie I could lay hands on, sir," answered Fergus.
"I took him in the act."

"Boy," said t