ony, the tone and the rhythm and
the time and the rhyme, instead of growing common to him, rejoiced
Gibbie more and more every feast, and with ever-growing reverence he
looked up to Donal as a mighty master-magician. But if Donal could
have looked down into Gibbie's bosom, he would have seen something
there beyond his comprehension. For Gibbie was already in the
kingdom of heaven, and Donal would have to suffer, before he would
begin even to look about for the door by which a man may enter into
it.

I wonder how much Gibbie was indebted to his constrained silence
during all these years. That he lost by it, no one will doubt; that
he gained also, a few will admit: though I should find it hard to
say what and how great, I cannot doubt it bore an important part in
the fostering of such thoughts and feelings and actions as were
beyond the vision of Donal, poet as he was growing to be. While
Donal read, rejoicing in the music both of sound and sense, Gibbie
was doing something besides: he was listening with the same ears,
and trying to see with the same eyes, which he brought to bear upon
the things Janet taught him out of the book. Already those first
weekly issues, lately commenced, of a popular literature had
penetrated into the mountains of Gormgarnet; but whether Donal read
Blind Harry from a thumbed old modern edition, or some new tale or
neat poem from the Edinburgh press, Gibbie was always placing what
he heard by the side, as it were, of what he knew; asking himself,
in this case and that, what Jesus Christ would have done, or what he
would require of a disciple. There must be one right way, he
argued. Sometimes his innocence failed to see that no disciple of
the Son of Man could, save by fearful failure, be in such
circumstances as the tale or ballad represented. But, whether
successful or not in the individual inquiry, the boy's mind and
heart and spirit, in this silent, unembarrassed brooding, as
energetic as it was peaceful, expanded upwards when it failed to
widen, and the widening would come after. Gifted, from the first of
his being, with such a rare drawing to his kind, he saw his utmost
affection dwarfed by the words and deeds of Jesus--beheld more and
more grand the requirements made of a man who would love his fellows
as Christ loved them. When he sank foiled from any endeavour to
understand how a man was to behave in certain circumstances, these
or those, he always took refuge in doing some