Gib

“ Gib, whose disbelief in steel rested as much upon pain memories and hatred as upon reason, was a fanatic; but at the same time great numbers of men with no such romantic bias of mind were violently excited on one side or the other of a fighting dispute. ”

“ Quality Street lived on its income. Young men succeeded their fathers in business. The girls, after music and finishing at Philadelphia, returned to New Damascus and married them.
The Gib Mansion might as well have been a mausoleum. Life was never entertained there. It did not expect to be. Jonet was nobody until Gib married her. After that she was the community’s commiseration. She died when Agnes, their only child, was ten. The obsequies were private. At the grave, besides the sexton and the minister, and Gib holding Agnes by the hand, there was one other person. ”

“ And he is hame to Gib, his man,
As fast as he could gang.
27 'Come forth, come forth, now, Gib, my man,
Till I pay you your fee;
Come forth, come forth, now, Gib, my man,
Weel payit sall ye be.'
28 And he has taen him Gib, his man,
And he has hangd him hie,
And he's hangit him oer his ain yate,
As high as high could be.
29 There was nae pity for that lady,
For she lay cald and dead,
But a' was for him, Glenkindie,
In bower he must go mad.
C
Kinloch's MSS, III, 139, in the handwriting of John Hill Burton. ”

“ It resembled one of the thrill rides at a carnival, the one that whirls you round and round like a ball on the end of a string. Gib entered a tiny cabin at the end of the large swinging arm and sat down in a thick foam-rubber reclining chair.
As he was strapped down, the tester said to him, “This is called the ‘Centrifuge,’ son, and it simulates the blast-off from Earth in a rocket ship. You appear to be a little young to be taking it, so if you’ve had enough just yank that lever in front of you and we’ll stop the machine.” ”

“ He was educated at the university of Edinburgh. His first serious impressions were caused by his unexpectedly witnessing the execution of a criminal in the Grassmarket. While he was attending the undergraduate classes the controversy was going on in the general assembly which led to the formation of the secession church under Ebenezer Erskine [q. v.] and others, and Gib was so impressed with the harsh treatment of the seceders, that he threw in his lot with them. ”

“ In the time of his absence that delusion of the Gibbites arose, from one John Gib sailor in Borrowstoness, who, with other three men and twenty-six women, vented and maintained the most strange delusions. Some time after, Mr. Cargil returned from England,427 and was at no small pains to reclaim them, but with little success. After his last conference with them [186] (at Darngavel in Cambusnethen parish) he come next sabbath, and preached at the Underbank wood, below Lanerk, and from thence to Loudon-hill, where he preached upon a fast day, being the 5th of May. ”

“ Tabu-Tabu had stepped in and planted a mighty right in the centre of Mr. Gibney's physiognomy, following it up with a hard left to the commodore's ear. Mr. Gibney rocked a moment on his sturdy legs, stepped back out of range, dropped both hands, and stared at Tabu-Tabu.
"I do believe the nigger'll lick you, Gib," said McGuffey anxiously. "He's got a horrible reach and a mule kick in each mit. ”

“ Well, my dear Bonny, you assure me that Scrub is a coward?
Bon. A chicken, as the saying is. You 'll have no creature to deal with but the ladies.
Gib. And I can assure you, friend, there's a great deal of address and good manners in robbing a lady; I am the most a gentleman that way that ever travelled the road.—But, my dear Bonny, this prize will be a galleon, a Vigo business.—I warrant you we shall bring off three of four thousand pounds. ”

“ All was still except the voices of those same prophet cocks, crying in the wilderness of the yet sunless world; a moo now and then from the byres; and the occasional stamp of a great hoof in the stable. Gibbie clambered up into the loft, and turning the cheeses about until he came upon the one he had gnawed before, again attacked it, and enlarged considerably the hole he had already made in it. ”

“ Gibbie went home as if Pearl-street had been the stairs of Glashgar, and the Auld Hoose a mansion in the heavens. He seemed to float along the way as one floats in a happy dream, where motion is born at once of the will, without the intermediating mechanics of nerve, muscle, and fulcrum. Love had been gathering and ever storing itself in his heart so many years for this brown dove! ”

“ Almost from the first moment of his being domiciled on Glashgar, what with the good food, the fine exercise, the exquisite air, and his great happiness, Gibbie began to grow; and he took to growing so fast that his legs soon shot far out of his winsey garment. ”

“ Gibbs started.
"No," he protested, "not Curly!"
"Sure!" she sneered, turning away in disgust of his doubt.
"What made you stand for it?"
"Well," she temporized, forced to be just, "it was only once. I had rousted a goose for his poke--all alone too--" She spoke with the pride she had always had in her dexterity, and Gibbs suddenly recalled the fact that she had been the first person in all their traditions who could take a pocketbook from a man, "weed" and replace it without his being aware; the remembrance pleased him and his eyes lighted up. ”

“ Surely it is not the outspread sea, however the sight of its storms and its labouring ships may enhance the sense of safety to the onlooker, but the outspread land of peace and plenty, with its nestling houses, its well-stocked yards, its cattle feeding in the meadows, and its men and horses at labour in the fields, that gives the deepest delight to the heart of the poet! Gibbie was one of the meek, and inherited the earth. ”

“ For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those—few at any moment on the earth—who do not “look before and after, and pine for what is not,” but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. Gibbie by no means belonged to the higher order, was as yet, indeed, not much better than a very blessed little animal. ”

“ Gibbie’s eyes went climbing up the spire that shot skyward over their heads. Around its point the clouds and the moon seemed to gather, grouping themselves in grand carelessness; and he thought of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven; to us mere heaps of watery vapour, ever ready to fall, drowning the earth in rain, or burying it in snow; to angel-feet they might be solid masses whereon to tread attendant upon him, who, although with his word he ruled winds and seas, loved to be waited on by the multitude of his own! ”

“ And now a mere daisy was enough to delight the heart of Gibbie. His joy in humanity so suddenly checked, and his thirst for it left unslaked, he had begun to see the human look in the face of the commonest flowers, to love the trusting stare of the daisy, that gold-hearted boy, and the gentle despondency of the girl harebell, dreaming of her mother, the azure. The wind, of which he had scarce thought as he met it roaming the streets like himself, was now a friend of his solitude, bringing him sweet odours, alive with the souls of bees, and cooling with bliss the heat of the long walk. ”

“ Every moment a tree fell and shot with it like a rocket. Looking up its course, they saw it come down the hillside a white streak, and burst into boiling brown and roar at their feet. The wind nearly swept them from their place; but they clung to the great stones, and saw the airy torrent, as if emulating that below it, fill itself with branches and leaves and lumps of foam. Then first Ginevra became fully aware of the danger in which the house was, and from which Gibbie had rescued her. ”

“ Suddenly Gibbie, in the midst of his astonishment and awful delight, noted the path of the new stream, and from his knowledge of the face of the mountain, perceived that its course was direct for the cottage. Down the hill he shot after it, as if it were a wild beast that his fault had freed from its cage. He was not terrified. One believing like him in the perfect Love and perfect Will of a Father of men, as the fact of facts, fears nothing. Fear is faithlessness. ”

“ He was not nearly reduced to extremity yet though—this little heir of the world: in his body he had splendid health, in his heart a great courage, and in his soul an ever-throbbing love. It was his love to the very image of man, that made the horror of the treatment he had received. Angus was and was not a man! After all, Gibbie was still one to be regarded with holy envy. ”

“ Bill Gibbs stood on the broad piazza, and, with the assistance of a crutch, he hobbled to the entrance of the apartment, and only pausing to recover his wind and compose his features, he pulled off his straw hat and entered.
“So ho! Mr. Gibbs,” said the man on the settee, as the burly, lame ruffian darkened the entrance, laying the book down as he spoke, and waving his delicate handkerchief before him.
“So ho! Mr. Gibbs, you’ve come back at last! Delighted to see you. I am, ’pon my soul. Ah! ”

“ GLASHGAR.
Up and up the hill went Gibbie. The path ceased altogether; but when up is the word in one’s mind—and up had grown almost a fixed idea with Gibbie—he can seldom be in doubt whether he is going right, even where there is no track. Indeed in all more arduous ways, men leave no track behind them, no finger-post—there is always but the steepness. ”

“ I may compare her to what I please, great or small—to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in the desert—a woman in wretchedness and rags. She carried her puny baby rolled hard in the corner of her scrap of black shawl. To the youths a sea of trouble looked out of those wild eyes. As she drew near them, she hesitated, half-stopped, and put out a hand from under the shawl—stretched out no arm, held out only a hand from the wrist, white against the night. Donal had no money. Gibbie had a shilling. ”

“ The worst storm in the world could not have made that heart quail. For, think! there had just been the strong, the well-dressed, the learned, the wise, the altogether mighty and considerable Donal, the cowherd, actually desiring him, wee Sir Gibbie Galbraith, the cinder of the city furnace, the naked, and generally the hungry little tramp, to wear his jacket to cover him from the storm! The idea was one of eternal triumph; and Gibbie, exulting in the unheard-of devotion and condescension of the thing, kept on laughing like a blessed cherub under the cow’s belly. ”

“ Now the whole world lay beneath him. It was cold; in some of the shadows lay snow—weary exile from both the sky and the sea and the ways of them—captive in the fetters of the cold—prisoner to the mountain top; but Gibbie felt no cold. In a glow with the climb, which at the last had been hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly air, and his soul with the feeling that he was above everything that was, uplifted on the very crown of the earth, he stood in his rags, a fluttering scarecrow, the conqueror of height, the discoverer of immensity, the monarch of space. ”

“ But the picture of Sir George, by the help of whisky and the mild hatching oven of Mistress Croale’s parlour, softly breaking from the shell of the cobbler, and floating a mild gentleman in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor wee Gibbie trotting outside in the frosty dark of the autumn night, through which the moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate, is hardly therefore the less pathetic. ”

“ Gibby reined his up as quickly to make his escape, but the convulsive force of the Englishman threw his horse over, and in its fall it tumbled against the legs of Gibby's horse with such force that it struck them all four from under him, and both he and his rider fell in a reverse direction, rolling plump over the wounded warrior and his forlorn encumbered steed, that was pawing the air at a furious rate. ”

“ Occasionally the triumph of expectation would exceed his control, when he would spring from the floor, and caper and strut about like a pigeon—soft as a shadow, for he knew his father could not bear noise in the morning—or behind his back execute a pantomimic dumb show of delight, in which he seemed with difficulty to restrain himself from jumping upon him, and hugging him in his ecstasy. Oh, best of parents! working thus even on a Sunday for his Gibbie, when everybody else was at church enjoying himself! ”

“ The sun was hot for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but even then in the shadow dwelt a cold breath—of the winter, or of death—of something that humanity felt unfriendly. To Gibbie, however, bare-legged, bare-footed, almost bare-bodied as he was, sun or shadow made small difference, except as one of the musical intervals of life that make the melody of existence. ”

“ Gibbie shook him at length, and told him, by two signs, that he must put on his Sunday clothes. Then first shyness, like the shroud of northern myth that lies in wait in a man’s path, leaped up, and wrapped itself around him. It was very well to receive ladies in a meadow, quite another thing to walk into their company in a grand room, such as, before entering Mrs. Sclater’s, he had never beheld even in Fairyland or the Arabian Nights. ”

“ Gibson had dreamed that he was carried by an eagle to Rome, and to Rome he determined to go, ‘if he went there on foot.’ He went thither, taking his unfinished bust of Roscoe with him, but not before he had been introduced to Fuseli, West, Flaxman, Blake, and Chantrey. ”

“ Now Gibbie, although he would not have looked so well in his woolly coat in Mrs. Sclater’s drawing-room as on the rocks of Glashgar, would have looked better in almost any other than the evening dress, now, alas! nearly European. Mr. Sclater, on the other hand, would have looked worse in any other because being less commonplace, it would have been less like himself; and so long as the commonplace conventional so greatly outnumber the simply individual, it is perhaps well the present fashion should hold. ”