pass."

Gibbie's agony passed, for God is not the God of the dead but of the
living. Through the immortal essence in him, life became again
life, and he ran about the streets as before. Some may think that
wee Sir Gibbie--as many now called him, some knowing the truth, and
others in kindly mockery--would get on all the better for the loss
of such a father; but it was not so. In his father he had lost his
Paradise, and was now a creature expelled. He was not so much to be
pitied as many a child dismissed by sudden decree from a home to a
school; but the streets and the people and the shops, the horses and
the dogs, even the penny-loaves though he was hungry, had lost half
their precious delight, when his father was no longer in the
accessible background, the heart of the blissful city. As to food
and clothing, he did neither much better nor any worse than before:
people were kind as usual, and kindness was to Gibbie the very milk
of mother Nature. Whose the hand that proffered it, or what the
form it took, he cared no more than a stray kitten cares whether the
milk set down to it be in a blue saucer or a white. But he always
made the right return. The first thing a kindness deserves is
acceptance, the next is transmission: Gibbie gave both, without
thinking much about either. For he never had taken, and indeed
never learned to take, a thought about what he should eat or what he
should drink, or wherewithal he should be clothed--a fault rendering
him, in the eyes of the economist of this world, utterly unworthy of
a place in it. There is a world, however, and one pretty closely
mixed up with this, though it never shows itself to one who has no
place in it, the birds of whose air have neither storehouse nor
barn, but are just such thoughtless cherubs--thoughtless for
themselves, that is--as wee Sir Gibbie. It would be useless to
attempt convincing the mere economist that this great city was a
little better, a little happier, a little merrier, for the presence
in it of the child, because he would not, even if convinced of the
fact, recognize the gain; but I venture the assertion to him, that
the conduct of not one of its inhabitants was the worse for the
example of Gibbie's apparent idleness; and that not one of the poor
women who now and then presented the small baronet with a penny, or
a bit of bread, or a scrap of meat, or a pair of old trousers--shoes
nobody gave him, and he neither desired nor needed any-