d not long to occupy the closet, for those of her
breed were in demand in the country.

CHAPTER XXXII.

PROLOGUE.

Ever since he became a dweller in the air of Glashgar, Gibbie,
mindful of his first visit thereto, and of his grand experience on
that occasion, had been in the habit, as often as he saw reason to
expect a thunder-storm, and his duties would permit, of ascending
the mountain, and there on the crest of the granite peak, awaiting
the arrival of the tumult. Everything antagonistic in the boy,
everything that could naturally find relief, or pleasure, or simple
outcome, in resistance or contention, debarred as it was by the
exuberance of his loving kindness from obtaining satisfaction or
alleviation in strife with his fellows, found it wherever he could
encounter the forces of Nature, in personal wrestle with them where
possible, and always in wildest sympathy with any uproar of the
elements. The absence of personality in them allowed the
co-existence of sympathy and antagonism in respect of them. Except
those truths awaking delight at once calm and profound, of which so
few know the power, and the direct influence of human relation,
Gibbie's emotional joy was more stirred by storm than by anything
else; and with all forms of it he was so familiar that, young as he
was, he had unconsciously begun to generalize on its phases.

Towards the evening of a wondrously fine day in the beginning of
August--a perfect day of summer in her matronly beauty, it began to
rain. All the next day the slopes and stairs of Glashgar were
alternately glowing in sunshine, and swept with heavy showers,
driven slanting in strong gusts of wind from the northwest. How
often he was wet through and dried again that day, Gibbie could not
have told. He wore so little that either took but a few moments,
and he was always ready for a change. The wind and the rain
together were cold, but that only served to let the sunshine deeper
into him when it returned.

In the afternoon there was less sun, more rain, and more wind; and
at last the sun seemed to give it up; the wind grew to a hurricane,
and the rain strove with it which should inhabit the space. The
whole upper region was like a huge mortar, in which the wind was the
pestle, and, with innumerable gyres, vainly ground at the rain.
Gibbie drove his sheep to the refuge of a pen on the lower slope of
a valley that ran at right angles to the wind, where they were
sheltered b