Gibbie was now without a home. He had had a whole city for his dwelling¹, every street of which had been to him as another hall in his own house, every lane as a passage from one set of rooms to another, every court as a closet, every house as a safe, guarding the only possessions he had, the only possessions he knew how to value—his fellow-mortals, radiant with faces, and friendly with hands and tongues. Great as was his delight in freedom, a delight he revelled² in from morning to night, and sometimes from night to morning, he had never had a notion of it that reached beyond the city, he never longed for larger space, for wider outlook. Space and outlook he had skyward—and seaward when he would, but even into these regions he had never yet desired to go. His world was the world of men; the presence of many was his greater room; his people themselves were his world. He had no idea of freedom in dissociation with human faces and voices and eyes. But now he had left all these, and as he ran from them a red pall³ seemed settling down behind him, wrapping up and hiding away his country, his home. For the first time in his life, the fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless stray of the streets felt himself alone. The sensation was an awful one. He had lost so many, and had not one left! That gash⁴ in Sambo's black throat had slain⁵ "a whole cityful." His loneliness grew upon him, until again he darted⁶ aside from the road into the bush, this time to hide from the Spectre of the Desert—the No Man. Deprived of human countenances⁸, the face of creation was a mask without eyes, and liberty a mere⁹ negation¹⁰. Not that Gibbie had ever thought about liberty; he had only enjoyed: not that he had ever thought about human faces; he had only loved them, and lived upon their smiles. "Gibbie wadna need to gang to h'aven," said Mysie, the baker's daughter, to her mother, one night, as they walked home from a merry-making. "What for that, lassie?" returned her mother. "Cause he wad be meeserable whaur there was nae drunk fowk," answered Mysie. And now it seemed to the poor, shocked, heart-wounded creature, as if the human face were just the one thing he could no more look upon. One haunted him, the black one, with the white, staring eyes, the mouth in its throat, and the white grinning teeth.  
It was a cold, fresh morning, cloudy and changeful, towards the end of April. It had rained, and would rain again; it might snow. Heavy undefined clouds, with saffron breaks and borders, hung about the east, but what was going to happen there—at least he did not think; he did not know east from west, and I doubt whether, although he had often seen the sun set, he had ever seen him rise. Yet even to him, city-creature as he was, it was plain something was going to happen there. And happen it did presently, and that with a splendour that for a moment blinded Gibbie. For just at the horizon there was a long horizontal slip of blue sky, and through that crack the topmost arc of the rising sun shot suddenly a thousand arrows of radiance into the brain of the boy. But the too-much light scorched¹¹ there a blackness instantly; and to the soul of Gibbie it was the blackness of the room from which he had fled, and upon it out came the white eyeballs and the brilliant teeth of his dead Sambo, and the red burst from his throat that answered the knife of the Malay. He shrieked¹², and struck with his hands against the sun from which came the terrible vision. Had he been a common child, his reason would have given way; but one result of the overflow¹³ of his love was, that he had never yet known fear for himself. His sweet confident face, innocent eyes, and caressing¹⁴ ways, had almost always drawn¹⁵ a response more or less in kind; and that certain some should not repel¹⁶ him, was a fuller response from them than gifts from others. Except now and then, rarely, a street boy a little bigger than himself, no one had ever hurt him, and the hurt upon these occasions had not gone very deep, for the child was brave and hardy¹⁷. So now it was not fear, but the loss of old confidence, a sickness coming over the heart and brain of his love, that unnerved him. It was not the horrid¹⁸ cruelty to his friend, and his own grievous loss thereby¹⁹, but the recoil²⁰ of his loving endeavour that, jarring him out of every groove²¹ of thought, every socket²² of habit, every joint²³ of action, cast him from the city, and made of him a wanderer indeed, not a wanderer in a strange country, but a wanderer in a strange world.
 
To no traveller could one land well be so different from another, as to Gibbie the country was from the town. He had seen bushes and trees before, but only over garden walls, or in one or two of the churchyards. He had looked from the quay²⁴ across to the bare shore on the other side, with its sandy hills, and its tall lighthouse on the top of the great rocks that bordered the sea; but, so looking, he had beheld²⁵ space as one looking from this world into the face of the moon, as a child looks upon vastness and possible dangers from his nurse's arms where it cannot come near him; for houses backed the quay all along; the city was behind him, and spread forth²⁶ her protecting arms. He had, once or twice, run out along the pier²⁷, which shot far into the immensity of the sea, like a causeway to another world—a stormy thread of granite²⁸, beaten upon both sides by the waves of the German Ocean; but it was with the sea and not the country he then made the small acquaintance—and that not without terror. The sea was as different from the city as the air into which he had looked up at night—too different to compare against it and feel the contrast; on neither could he set foot; in neither could he be required to live and act—as now in this waste of enterable and pervious extent.
 
Its own horror drove the vision away, and Gibbie saw the world again—saw, but did not love it. The sun seemed but to have looked up to mock him and go down again, for he had crossed the crack, and was behind a thick mass of cloud; a cold damp wind, spotted²⁹ with sparkles of rain, blew fitfully from the east; the low bushes among which he sat, sent forth a chill sighing all about him, as they sifted³⁰ the wind into sound; the smell of the damp earth was strange to him—he did not know the freshness, the new birth of which it breathed; below him the gloomy river, here deep, smooth, moody³¹, sullen³², there puckered³³ with the grey ripples³⁴ of a shallow laughter under the cold breeze, went flowing heedless to the city. There only was—or had been, friendliness³⁵, comfort, home! This was emptiness—the abode³⁶ of things, not beings. Yet never once did Gibbie think of returning to the city. He rose and wandered up the wide road along the river bank, farther and farther from it—his only guide the words of his father, "Up Daurside;" his sole comfort the feeling of having once more to do with his father so long departed, some relation still with the paradise of his old world. Along cultivated fields and copses on the one side, and on the other a steep descent to the river, covered here and there with trees, but mostly with rough grass and bushes and stones, he followed the king's highway. There were buttercups and plenty of daisies within his sight—primroses, too, on the slope beneath; but he did not know flowers, and his was not now the mood for discovering what they were. The exercise revived him, and he began to be hungry. But how could there be anything to eat in the desert, inhospitable succession of trees and fields and hedges, through which the road wound endlessly along, like a dead street, having neither houses nor paving stones? Hunger, however, was far less enfeebling to Gibbie than to one accustomed to regular meals, and he was in no anxiety about either when or what he should eat.
 
The morning advanced, and by-and-by he began to meet a fellow-creature now and then upon the road; but at sight of everyone a feeling rose in him such as he had never had towards human being before: they seemed somehow of a different kind from those in the town, and they did not look friendly as they passed. He did not know that he presented to them a very different countenance⁷ from that which his fellow-citizens had always seen him wear; for the mingled³⁸ and conflicting emotions of his spirit had sent out upon it an expression which, accompanied by the misery³⁹ of his garments, might well, to the superficial or inexperienced observer, convey the idea that he was a fugitive⁴⁰ and guilty. He was so uncomfortable at length from the way the people he met scrutinized⁴¹ him that, when he saw anyone coming, he would instantly turn aside and take the covert⁴² of thicket⁴³, or hedge, or stone wall, until the bearer of eyes had passed. His accustomed trot⁴⁴, which he kept up for several hours, made him look the more suspicious; but his feet, hardened from very infancy⁴⁵ as they were, soon found the difference between the smooth flags and the sharp stones of the road, and before noon he was walking at quite a sober, although still active, pace. Doubtless it slackened the sooner that he knew no goal, no end to his wandering. Up Daurside was the one vague notion he had of his calling, his destiny, and with his short, quick step, his progress was considerable; he passed house after house, farm after farm; but, never in the way of asking for anything, though as little in the way of refusing, he went nearer none of them than the road led him. Besides, the houses were very unlike those in the city, and not at all attractive to him. He came at length to a field, sloping to the road, which was covered with leaves like some he had often seen in the market. They drew him; and as there was but a low and imperfect hedge between, he got over, and found it was a crop of small yellow turnips⁴⁶. He gathered as many as he could carry, and ate them as he went along. Happily no agricultural person encountered him for some distance, though Gibbie knew no special cause to congratulate himself upon that, having not the slightest conscience of offence in what he did. His notions of property were all associated with well-known visible or neighbouring owners, and in the city he would never have dreamed of touching⁴⁸ anything that was not given him, except it lay plainly a lost thing. But here, where everything was so different, and he saw none of the signs of ownership to which he was accustomed, the idea of property did not come to him; here everything looked lost, or on the same category with the chips and parings and crusts that were thrown out in the city, and became common property. Besides, the love which had hitherto rendered covetousness⁴⁹ impossible, had here no object whose presence might have suggested a doubt, to supply in a measure the lack of knowledge; hunger, instead, was busy in his w............