-ever felt
the poorer for the gift, or complained that she should be so taxed.

Positively or negatively, then, everybody was good to him, and
Gibbie felt it; but what could make up for the loss of his Paradise,
the bosom of a father? Drunken father as he was, I know of nothing
that can or ought to make up for such a loss, except that which can
restore it--the bosom of the Father of fathers.

He roamed the streets, as all his life before, the whole of the day,
and part of the night; he took what was given him, and picked up
what he found. There were some who would gladly have brought him
within the bounds of an ordered life; he soon drove them to despair,
however, for the streets had been his nursery, and nothing could
keep him out of them. But the sparrow and the rook are just as
respectable in reality, though not in the eyes of the hen-wife, as
the egg-laying fowl, or the dirt-gobbling duck; and, however
Gibbie's habits might shock the ladies of Mr. Sclater's congregation
who sought to civilize him, the boy was no more about mischief in
the streets at midnight, than they were in their beds. They
collected enough for his behoof to board him for a year with an old
woman who kept a school, and they did get him to sleep one night in
her house. But in the morning, when she would not let him run out,
brought him into the school-room, her kitchen, and began to teach
him to write, Gibbie failed to see the good of it. He must have
space, change, adventure, air, or life was not worth the name to
him. Above all he must see friendly faces, and that of the old dame
was not such. But he desired to be friendly with her, and once, as
she leaned over him, put up his hand--not a very clean one, I am
bound to give her the advantage of my confessing--to stroke her
cheek: she pushed him roughly away, rose in indignation upon her
crutch, and lifted her cane to chastise him for the insult. A class
of urchins, to Gibbie's eyes at least looking unhappy, were at the
moment blundering through the twenty-third psalm. Ever after, even
when now Sir Gilbert more than understood the great song, the words,
"thy rod and thy staff," like the spell of a necromancer would still
call up the figure of the dame irate, in her horn spectacles and her
black-ribboned cap, leaning with one arm on her crutch, and with the
other uplifting what was with her no mere symbol of authority. Like
a shell from a mortar, he departed from the house. She hobbl