d, it was one of those
love-awful, glory-sad chapters in the end of the Gospel of John,
over which hangs the darkest cloud of human sorrow, shot through and
through with the radiance of light eternal, essential, invincible.
Whether it was the uncertain response to Janet's tone merely, or to
truth too loud to be heard, save as a thrill, of some chord in his
own spirit, having its one end indeed twisted around an earthly peg,
but the other looped to a tail-piece far in the unknown--I cannot
tell; it may have been that the name now and then recurring brought
to his mind the last words of poor Sambo; anyhow, when Janet looked
up, she saw the tears rolling down the child's face. At the same
time, from the expression of his countenance, she judged that his
understanding had grasped nothing. She turned therefore to the
parable of the prodigal son, and read it. Even that had not a few
words and phrases unknown to Gibbie, but he did not fail to catch
the drift of the perfect story. For had not Gibbie himself had a
father, to whose bosom he went home every night? Let but love be
the interpreter, and what most wretched type will not serve the turn
for the carriage of profoundest truth! The prodigal's lowest
degradation, Gibbie did not understand; but Janet saw the expression
of the boy's face alter with every tone of the tale, through all the
gamut between the swine's trough and the arms of the father. Then
at last he burst--not into tears--Gibbie was not much acquainted
with weeping--but into a laugh of loud triumph. He clapped his
hands, and in a shiver of ecstasy, stood like a stork upon one leg,
as if so much of him was all that could be spared for this lower
world, and screwed himself together.

Janet was well satisfied with her experiment. Most Scotch women,
and more than most Scotch men, would have rebuked him for laughing,
but Janet knew in herself a certain tension of delight which nothing
served to relieve but a wild laughter of holiest gladness; and never
in tears of deepest emotion did her heart appeal more directly to
its God. It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God, that is
afraid to laugh in his presence.

Thus had Gibbie his first lesson in the only thing worth learning,
in that which, to be learned at all, demands the united energy of
heart and soul and strength and mind; and from that day he went on
learning it. I cannot tell how, or what were the slow stages by
which his mind budded and swe