aminations, which were honest and honourable to him; it was hidden
in his thoughts, his aspirations, his growth, and his verse--all
which may be seen should I one day tell Donal's story. For Gibbie,
the minister had not been long teaching him, before he began to
desire to make a scholar of him. Partly from being compelled to
spend some labour upon it, the boy was gradually developing an
unusual facility in expression. His teacher, compact of
conventionalities, would have modelled the result upon some writer
imagined by him a master of style; but the hurtful folly never got
any hold of Gibbie: all he ever cared about was to say what he
meant, and avoid saying something else; to know when he had not said
what he meant, and to set the words right. It resulted that, when
people did not understand what he meant, the cause generally lay
with them not with him; and that, if they sometimes smiled over his
mode, it was because it lay closer to nature than theirs: they would
have found it a hard task to improve it.

What the fault with his organs of speech was, I cannot tell. His
guardian lost no time in having them examined by a surgeon in high
repute, a professor of the university, but Dr. Skinner's opinion put
an end to question and hope together. Gibbie was not in the least
disappointed. He had got on very well as yet without speech. It
was not like sight or hearing. The only voice he could not hear was
his own, and that was just the one he had neither occasion nor
desire to hear. As to his friends, those who had known him the
longest minded his dumbness the least. But the moment the defect
was understood to be irreparable, Mrs. Sclater very wisely proceeded
to learn the finger-speech; and as she learned it, she taught it to
Gibbie.

As to his manners, which had been and continued to be her chief
care, a certain disappointment followed her first rapid success: she
never could get them to take on the case-hardening needful for what
she counted the final polish. They always retained a certain
simplicity which she called childishness. It came in fact of
childlikeness, but the lady was not child enough to distinguish the
difference--as great as that between the back and the front of a
head. As, then, the minister found him incapable of forming a
style, though time soon proved him capable of producing one, so the
minister's wife found him as incapable of putting on company manners
of any sort, as most people ar