and aspire still.

One evening his path vanished between twilight and moonrise, and
just as it became dark he found himself at a rough gate, through
which he saw a field. There was a pretty tall hedge on each side of
the gate, and he was now a sufficiently experienced traveller to
conclude that he was not far from some human abode. He climbed the
gate and found himself in a field of clover. It was a splendid big
bed, and even had the night not been warm, he would not have
hesitated to sleep in it. He had never had a cold, and had as
little fear for his health as for his life. He was hungry, it is
true; but although food was doubtless more delicious to such hunger
as his--that of the whole body, than it can be to the mere palate
and culinary imagination of an epicure, it was not so necessary to
him that he could not go to sleep without it. So down he lay in the
clover, and was at once unconscious.

When he woke, the moon was high in the heavens, and had melted the
veil of the darkness from the scene of still, well-ordered comfort.
A short distance from his couch, stood a little army of ricks,
between twenty and thirty of them, constructed perfectly--smooth and
upright and round and large, each with its conical top netted in
with straw-rope, and finished off with what the herd-boy called a
toupican--a neatly tied and trim tuft of the straw with which it was
thatched, answering to the stone-ball on the top of a gable. Like
triangles their summits stood out against the pale blue,
moon-diluted air. They were treasure-caves, hollowed out of space,
and stored with the best of ammunition against the armies of hunger
and want; but Gibbie, though he had seen many of them, did not know
what they were. He had seen straw used for the bedding of cattle
and horses, and supposed that the chief end of such ricks. Nor had
he any clear idea that the cattle themselves were kept for any other
object than to make them comfortable and happy. He had stood behind
their houses in the dark, and heard them munching and grinding away
even in the night. Probably the country was for the cattle, as the
towns for the men; and that would explain why the country-people
were so inferior. While he stood gazing, a wind arose behind the
hills, and came blowing down some glen that opened northwards;
Gibbie felt it cold, and sought the shelter of the ricks.

Great and solemn they looked as he drew nigh--near each other, yet
enough apart for p