of urchins, to Gibbie's eyes at least looking unhappy, were at the
moment blundering through the twenty-third psalm. Ever after, even
when now Sir Gilbert more than understood the great song, the words,
"thy rod and thy staff," like the spell of a necromancer would still
call up the figure of the dame irate, in her horn spectacles and her
black-ribboned cap, leaning with one arm on her crutch, and with the
other uplifting what was with her no mere symbol of authority. Like
a shell from a mortar, he departed from the house. She hobbled to
the door after him, but his diminutive figure many yards away, his
little bare legs misty with swiftness as he ran, was the last she
ever saw of him, and her pupils had a bad time of it the rest of the
day. He never even entered the street again in which she lived.
Thus, after one night's brief interval of respectability, he was
again a rover of the city, a flitting insect that lighted here and
there, and spread wings of departure the moment a fresh desire
awoke.

It would be difficult to say where he slept. In summer anywhere; in
winter where he could find warmth. Like animals better clad than
he, yet like him able to endure cold, he revelled in mere heat when
he could come by it. Sometimes he stood at the back of a baker's
oven, for he knew all the haunts of heat about the city; sometimes
he buried himself in the sids (husks of oats) lying ready to feed
the kiln of a meal-mill; sometimes he lay by the furnace of the
steam-engine of the water-works. One man employed there, when his
time was at night, always made a bed for Gibbie: he had lost his own
only child, and this one of nobody's was a comfort to him.

Even those who looked upon wandering as wicked, only scolded into
the sweet upturned face, pouring gall into a cup of wine too full to