Sometimes he walked in the water, along the bed of the burn itself; sometimes he had to scramble up its steep side, to pass one of the many little cataracts of its descent.

Here and there a small silver birch, or a mountain-ash, or a stunted fir-tree, looking like a wizard child, hung over the stream.

Its banks were mainly of rock and heather, but now and then a small patch of cultivation intervened.

Gibbie had no thought that he was gradually leaving the abodes of men behind him; he knew no reason why in ascending things should change, and be no longer as in plainer ways.
For what he knew, there might be farm after farm, up and up for ever, to the gates of heaven.

But it would no longer have troubled him greatly to leave all houses behind him for a season.