sun shot suddenly a thousand arrows of
radiance into the brain of the boy. But the too-much light scorched
there a blackness instantly; and to the soul of Gibbie it was the
blackness of the room from which he had fled, and upon it out came
the white eyeballs and the brilliant teeth of his dead Sambo, and
the red burst from his throat that answered the knife of the Malay.
He shrieked, and struck with his hands against the sun from which
came the terrible vision. Had he been a common child, his reason
would have given way; but one result of the overflow of his love
was, that he had never yet known fear for himself. His sweet
confident face, innocent eyes, and caressing ways, had almost always
drawn a response more or less in kind; and that certain some should
not repel him, was a fuller response from them than gifts from
others. Except now and then, rarely, a street boy a little bigger
than himself, no one had ever hurt him, and the hurt upon these
occasions had not gone very deep, for the child was brave and hardy.
So now it was not fear, but the loss of old confidence, a sickness
coming over the heart and brain of his love, that unnerved him. It
was not the horrid cruelty to his friend, and his own grievous loss
thereby, but the recoil of his loving endeavour that, jarring him
out of every groove of thought, every socket of habit, every joint
of action, cast him from the city, and made of him a wanderer
indeed, not a wanderer in a strange country, but a wanderer in a
strange world.

To no traveller could one land well be so different from another, as
to Gibbie the country was from the town. He had seen bushes and
trees before, but only over garden walls, or in one or two of the
churchyards. He had looked from the quay across to the bare shore
on the other side, with its sandy hills, and its tall lighthouse on
the top of the great rocks that bordered the sea; but, so looking,
he had beheld space as one looking from this world into the face of
the moon, as a child looks upon vastness and possible dangers from
his nurse's arms where it cannot come near him; for houses backed
the quay all along; the city was behind him, and spread forth her
protecting arms. He had, once or twice, run out along the pier,
which shot far into the immensity of the sea, like a causeway to
another world--a stormy thread of granite, beaten upon both sides by
the waves of the German Ocean; but it was with the sea and not the
country he th