whose children they were was nearer than the one to the other,
nearer than sun or wind or daisy or Chyld Dyring. To his amazement,
Donal saw the tears gathering in Gibbie's eyes. He was as one who
gazes into the abyss of God's will--sees only the abyss, cannot see
the will, and weeps. The child in whom neither cold nor hunger nor
nakedness nor loneliness could move a throb of self-pity, was moved
to tears that a loveliness, to him strange and unintelligible, had
passed away, and he had no power to call it back.

"Wad ye like to hear't again?" asked Donal, more than half
understanding him instinctively.

Gibbie's face answered with a flash, and Donal read the poem again,
and Gibbie's delight returned greater than before, for now something
like a dawn began to appear among the cloudy words. Donal read it a
third time, and closed the book, for it was almost the hour for
driving the cattle home. He had never yet seen, and perhaps never
again did see, such a look of thankful devotion on human countenance
as met his lifted eyes.

How much Gibbie even then understood of the lovely eerie old ballad,
it is impossible for me to say. Had he a glimmer of the return of
the buried mother? Did he think of his own? I doubt if he had ever
thought that he had a mother; but he may have associated the tale
with his father, and the boots he was always making for him.
Certainly it was the beginning of much. But the waking up of a
human soul to know itself in the mirror of its thoughts and
feelings, its loves and delights, oppresses me with so heavy a sense
of marvel and inexplicable mystery, that when I imagine myself such
as Gibbie then was, I cannot imagine myself coming awake. I can
hardly believe that, from being such as Gibbie was the hour before
he heard the ballad, I should ever have come awake. Yet here I am,
capable of pleasure unspeakable from that and many another ballad,
old and new! somehow, at one time or another, or at many times in
one, I have at last come awake! When, by slow filmy unveilings,
life grew clearer to Gibbie, and he not only knew, but knew that he
knew, his thoughts always went back to that day in the meadow with
Donal Grant as the beginning of his knowledge of beautiful things in
the world of man. Then first he saw nature reflected,
Narcissus-like, in the mirror of her humanity, her highest self.
But when or how the change in him began, the turn of the balance,
the first push towards life of