he laird, rolling his eyes, more unsteady than usual
with indignation, in the direction of Gibbie, "what have you to say
for yourself?"

Gibbie had no say--and nothing to say that his questioner could
either have understood or believed; the truth from his lips would
but have presented him a lying hypocrite to the wisdom of his judge.
As it was, he smiled, looking up fearless in the face of the
magistrate, so awful in his own esteem.

"What is your name?" asked the laird, speaking yet more sternly.

Gibbie still smiled and was silent, looking straight in his
questioner's eyes. He dreaded nothing from the laird. Fergus had
beaten him, but Fergus he classed with the bigger boys who had
occasionally treated him roughly; this was a man, and men, except
they were foreign sailors, or drunk, were never unkind. He had no
idea of his silence causing annoyance. Everybody in the city had
known he could not answer; and now when Fergus and the laird
persisted in questioning him, he thought they were making kindly
game of him, and smiled the more. Nor was there much about Mr.
Galbraith to rouse a suspicion of the contrary; for he made a great
virtue of keeping his temper when most he caused other people to
lose theirs.

"I see the young vagabond is as impertinent as he is vicious," he
said at last, finding that to no interrogation could he draw forth
any other response than a smile. "Here Angus,"--and he turned to the
gamekeeper--"take him into the coach-house, and teach him a little
behaviour. A touch or two of the whip will find his tongue for him."

Angus seized the little gentleman by the neck, as if he had been a
polecat, and at arm's length walked him unresistingly into the
coach-house. There, with one vigorous tug, he tore the jacket from
his back, and his only other garment, dependent thereupon by some
device known only to Gibbie, fell from him, and he stood in helpless
nakedness, smiling still: he had never done anything shameful,
therefore had no acquaintance with shame. But when the scowling
keeper, to whom poverty was first cousin to poaching, and who hated
tramps as he hated vermin, approached him with a heavy cart whip in
his hand, he cast his eyes down at his white sides, very white
between his brown arms and brown legs, and then lifted them in a
mute appeal, which somehow looked as if it were for somebody else,
against what he could no longer fail to perceive the man's intent.
But he had no notion of