He did not remember ever having been kissed.

In that granite city, the women were not much given to kissing children, even their own, but if they had been, who of them would have thought of kissing Gibbie! The baker's wife, kind as she always was to him, would have thought it defilement to press her lips to those of the beggar child.

And how is any child to thrive without kisses! The first caresses Gibbie ever knew as such, were given him by Mother Nature herself.

It was only, however, by degrees, though indeed rapid degrees, that he became capable of them.

In the first part of his journey he was stunned, stupid, lost in change, distracted between a suddenly vanished past, and a future slow dawning in the present.