e roused for a
moment, it was but to recognize at once the cause of the tumult, and
with the remark, "It's only wee Gibbie luggin' hame Sir George," to
turn on the other side and fall asleep again.

Arrived at last at the garret door, which stood wide open, Gibbie
had small need of light in the nearly pitch darkness of the place,
for there was positively nothing to stumble over or against between
the door and the ancient four-post bed, which was all of his
father's house that remained to Sir George. With heavy shuffling
feet the drunkard lumbered laboriously bedward; and the bare posts
and crazy frame groaned and creaked as he fell upon the oat-chaff
that lay waiting him in place of the vanished luxury of feathers.
Wee Gibbie flew at his legs, nor rested until, the one after the
other, he had got them on the bed; if then they were not very
comfortably deposited, he knew that, in his first turn, their owner
would get them all right.

And now rose the culmen of Gibbie's day! its cycle, rounded through
regions of banishment, returned to its nodus of bliss. In triumph
he spread over his sleeping father his dead mother's old plaid of
Gordon tartan, all the bedding they had, and without a moment's
further delay--no shoes even to put off--crept under it, and nestled
close upon the bosom of his unconscious parent. A victory more!
another day ended with success! his father safe, and all his own!
the canopy of the darkness and the plaid over them, as if they were
the one only two in the universe! his father unable to leave
him--his for whole dark hours to come! It was Gibbie's paradise
now! His heaven was his father's bosom, to which he clung as no
infant yet ever clung to his mother's. He never thought to pity
himself that the embrace was all on his side, that no answering
pressure came back from the prostrate form. He never said to
himself, "My father is a drunkard, but I must make the best of it;
he is all I have!" He clung to his one possession--only clung: this
was his father--all in all to him. What must be the bliss of such a
heart--of any heart, when it comes to know that there is a father of
fathers, yea, a father of fatherhood! a father who never slumbers
nor sleeps, but holds all the sleeping in his ever waking bosom--a
bosom whose wakefulness is the sole fountain of their slumber!

The conscious bliss of the child was of short duration, for in a few
minutes he was fast asleep; but for the gain of tho