th the placidity of his countenance.
Perhaps the resulting queerness in the expression of the little
vagrant, a look as if he had been hunted till his body and soul were
nearly ruffled asunder, and had already parted company in aim and
interest, might have been the first thing to strike a careless
observer. But if the heart was not a careless one, the eye would
look again and discover a stronger stillness than mere placidity--a
sort of live peace abiding in that weather-beaten little face under
its wild crown of human herbage. The features of it were
well-shaped, and not smaller than proportioned to the small whole of
his person. His eyes--partly, perhaps, because there was so little
flesh upon his bones--were large, and in repose had much of a soft
animal expression: there was not in them the look of You and I know.
Frequently, too, when occasion roused the needful instinct, they
had a sharp expression of outlook and readiness, which, without a
trace of fierceness or greed, was yet equally animal. Only all the
time there was present something else, beyond characterization:
behind them something seemed to lie asleep. His hands and feet were
small and childishly dainty, his whole body well-shaped and well put
together--of which the style of his dress rather quashed the
evidence.

Such was Gibbie to the eye, as he rose from Daurside to the last
cultivated ground on the borders of the burn, and the highest
dwelling on the mountain. It was the abode of a cottar, and was a
dependency of the farm he had just left. The cottar was an old man
of seventy; his wife was nearly sixty. They had reared stalwart
sons and shapely daughters, now at service here and there in the
valleys below--all ready to see God in nature, and recognize Him in
providence. They belong to a class now, I fear, extinct, but once,
if my love prejudice not my judgment too far, the glory and strength
of Scotland: their little acres are now swallowed up in the larger
farms.

It was a very humble dwelling, built of turf upon a foundation of
stones, and roofed with turf and straw--warm, and nearly impervious
to the searching airs of the mountain-side. One little window of a
foot and a half square looked out on the universe. At one end stood
a stack of peat, half as big as the cottage itself, All around it
were huge rocks, some of them peaks whose masses went down to the
very central fires, others only fragments that had rolled from
above. Here a