This day was warmer; the spring had come a step nearer; the dog had been a comforter to him, and the horror had begun to assuage; he began to grow aware of the things about him, and to open his eyes to them.Once he saw a primrose in a little dell, and left the road to look at it.But as he went, he set his foot in the water of a chalybeate spring, which was trickling through the grass, and dyeing the ground red about it: filled with horror he fled, and for some time dared never go near a primrose.And still upon his right hand was the great river, flowing down towards the home he had left; now through low meadows, now through upshouldered fields of wheat and oats, now through rocky heights covered with the graceful silver-barked birch, the mountain ash, and the fir.Every time Gibbie, having lost sight of it by some turn of the road or some interposing eminence, caught its gleam afresh, his first feeling was that it was hurrying to the city, where the dead man lay, to tell where Gibbie was.Why he, who had from infancy done just as he pleased, should now have begun to dread interference with his liberty, he could not himself have told.Perhaps the fear was but the shadow of his new-born aversion to the place where he had seen those best-loved countenances change so suddenly and terribly--cease to smile, but not cease to stare.
That second day he fared better, too, than the first; for he came on a family of mongrel gipsies, who fed him well out of their kettle, and, taken with his looks, thought to keep him for begging purposes.
But now that Gibbie's confidence in human nature had been so rudely shaken, he had already begun, with analysis unconscious, to read the human countenance, questioning it; and he thought he saw something that would hurt, in the eyes of two of the men and one of the women.
Therefore, in the middle of the night, he slipped silently out of the tent of rags, in which he had lain down with the gipsy children, and ere the mothers woke, was a mile up the river.
But I must not attempt the detail of this part of his journey.It is enough that he got through it.He met with some adventures, and suffered a good deal from hunger and cold.Had he not been hardy as well as fearless he must have died.But, now from this quarter, now from that, he got all that was needful for one of God's birds.Once he found in a hedge the nest of an errant and secretive hen, and recognizing the eggs as food authorized by the shop windows and market of the city, soon qualified himself to have an opinion of their worth.Another time he came upon a girl milking a cow in a shed, and his astonishment at the marvels of the process was such, that he forgot even the hunger that was rendering him faint.He had often seen cows in the city, but had never suspected what they were capable of.When the girl caught sight of him, staring with open mouth, she was taken with such a fit of laughter, that the cow, which was ill-tempered, kicked out, and overturned the pail.Now because of her troublesomeness this cow was not milked beside the rest, and the shed where she stood was used for farm-implements only.The floor of it was the earth, beaten hard, and worn into hollows.When the milk settled in one of these, Gibbie saw that it was lost to the girl, and found to him: undeterred by the astounding nature of the spring from which he had just seen it flow, he threw himself down, and drank like a calf.Her laughter ended, the girl was troubled: she would be scolded for her clumsiness in allowing Hawkie to kick over the pail, but the eagerness of the boy after the milk troubled her more.She told him to wait, and running to the house, returned with two large pieces of oatcake, which she gave him.
Thus, one way and another, food came to Gibbie.Drink was to be had in almost any hollow.Sleep was scattered everywhere over the world.For warmth, only motion and a seasoned skin were necessary:
the latter Gibbie had; the former, already a habit learned in the streets, had now become almost a passion.