and of peace and plenty, with its nestling houses, its
well-stocked yards, its cattle feeding in the meadows, and its men
and horses at labour in the fields, that gives the deepest delight
to the heart of the poet! Gibbie was one of the meek, and inherited
the earth. Throned on the mountain, he beheld the multiform "goings
on of life," and in love possessed the whole. He was of the
poet-kind also, and now that he was a shepherd, saw everything with
shepherd-eyes. One moment, to his fancy, the great sun above played
the shepherd to the world, the winds were the dogs, and the men and
women the sheep. The next, in higher mood, he would remember the
good shepherd of whom Janet had read to him, and pat the head of the
collie that lay beside him: Oscar too was a shepherd and no
hireling; he fed the sheep; he turned them from danger and
barrenness; and he barked well.

"I'm the dumb dog!" said Gibbie to himself, not knowing that he was
really a copy in small of the good shepherd; "but maybe there may be
mair nor ae gait o' barkin'."

Then what a joy it was to the heaven-born obedience of the child, to
hearken to every word, watch every look, divine every wish of the
old man! Child Hercules could not have waited on mighty old Saturn
as Gibbie waited on Robert. For he was to him the embodiment of all
that was reverend and worthy, a very gulf of wisdom, a mountain of
rectitude. Gibbie was one of those few elect natures to whom
obedience is a delight--a creature so different from the vulgar that
they have but one tentacle they can reach such with--that of
contempt.

"I jist lo'e the bairn as the verra aipple o' my ee." said Robert.
"I can scarce consaive a wuss, but there's the cratur wi' a grip o'
't! He seems to ken what's risin' i' my min', an' in a moment he's
up like the dog to be ready, an' luiks at me waitin'."

Nor was it long before the town-bred child grew to love the heavens
almost as dearly as the earth. He would gaze and gaze at the clouds
as they came and went, and watching them and the wind, weighing the
heat and the cold, and marking many indications, known some of them
perhaps only to himself, understood the signs of the earthly times
at length nearly as well as an insect or a swallow, and far better
than long-experienced old Robert. The mountain was Gibbie's very
home; yet to see him far up on it, in the red glow of the setting
sun, with his dog, as obedient as himself, hanging upon his every