monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations.

When the winter came, with its frost and snow, Gibbie saved Robert
much suffering. At first Robert was unwilling to let him go out
alone in stormy weather; but Janet believed that the child doing the
old man's work would be specially protected. All through the hard
time, therefore, Gibbie went and came, and no evil befell him.
Neither did he suffer from the cold; for, a sheep having died
towards the end of the first autumn, Robert, in view of Gibbie's
coming necessity, had begged of his master the skin, and dressed it
with the wool upon it; and of this, between the three of them, they
made a coat for him; so that he roamed the hill like a savage, in a
garment of skin.

It became, of course, before very long, well known about the country
that Mr. Duff's crofters upon Glashgar had taken in and were
bringing up a foundling--some said an innocent, some said a wild
boy--who helped Robert with his sheep, and Janet with her cow, but
could not speak a word of either Gaelic or English. By and by,
strange stories came to be told of his exploits, representing him as
gifted with bodily powers as much surpassing the common, as his
mental faculties were assumed to be under the ordinary standard.
The rumour concerning him swelled as well as spread, mainly from
the love of the marvellous common in the region, I suppose, until,
towards the end of his second year on Glashgar, the notion of Gibbie
in the imaginations of the children of Daurside, was that of an
almost supernatural being, who had dwelt upon, or rather who had
haunted, Glashgar from time immemorial, and of whom they had been
hearing all their lives; and, although they had never heard anything
bad of him--that he was wild, that he wore a hairy skin, that he
could do more than any other boy dared attempt, that he was dumb,
and that yet (for this also was said) sheep and dogs and cattle, and
even the wild creatures of the mountain, could understand him
perfectly--these statements were more than enough, acting on the
suspicion and fear belonging to the savage in their own bosoms, to
envelope the idea of him in a mist of dread, deepening to such
horror in the case of the more timid and imaginative of them, that
when the twilight began to gather about the cottages and farmhouses,
the very mention of "the beast-loon o' Glashgar" was enough, and
that for miles up and down the river, to send many of the children
scouring like