eling something wet, looked,
and burst into a merry laugh.

"I am sorry I have hurt you," said the minister, not a little
relieved at the sound; "but how dared you write such a--such an
insolence? A clergyman never gets drunk."

Gibbie picked up the frame which the minister had dropped in his
fall: a piece of the slate was still sticking in one side, and he
wrote upon it:

I will kno better the next time. I thout it was alwais whisky that
made peeple like that. I begg your pardon, sir.

He handed him the fragment, ran to his own room, returned presently,
looking all right, and when Mr. Sclater would have attended to his
wound, would not let him even look at it, laughing at the idea.
Still further relieved to find there was nothing to attract
observation to the injury, and yet more ashamed of himself, the
minister made haste to the refuge of their work; but it did not
require the gleam of the paper substituted for the slate, to keep
him that morning in remembrance of what he had done; indeed it
hovered about him long after the gray of the new slate had passed
into a dark blue.

From that time, after luncheon, which followed immediately upon
lessons, Gibbie went and came as he pleased. Mrs. Sclater begged he
would never be out after ten o'clock without having let them know
that he meant to stay all night with his friend: not once did he
neglect this request, and they soon came to have perfect confidence
not only in any individual promise he might make, but in his general
punctuality. Mrs. Sclater never came to know anything of his
wounded head, and it gave the minister a sharp sting of compunction,
as well as increased his sense of moral inferiority, when he saw
that for a fortnight or so he never took his favourite place at her
feet, evidently that she should not look down on his head.

The same evening they had friends to dinner. Already Gibbie was so
far civilized, as they called it, that he might have sat at any
dining-table without attracting the least attention, but that
evening he attracted a great deal. For he could scarcely eat his
own dinner for watching the needs of those at the table with him,
ready to spring from his chair and supply the least lack. This
behaviour naturally harassed the hostess, and at last, upon one of
those occasions, the servants happening to be out of the room, she
called him to her side, and said,

"You were quite right to do that now, Gilbert, but please never do
su