Now, he had not heard of Chaucer, who made love to the daisies four hundred years before Burns .-- God only knows what gospellers they have been on his middle-earth.

All its days his daisies have been coming and going, and they are not old yet, nor have worn out yet their lovely garments, though they patch and darn just as little as they toil and spin.
"Can ye read, cratur ?" asked Donal.
Gibbie shook his head.
"Canna ye speyk, man ?" Again Gibbie shook his head.
"Can ye hear ?" Gibbie burst out laughing.

He knew that he heard better than other people.
"Hearken till this than," said Donal.
He took his book from the grass, and read, in a chant, or rather in a lilt, the Danish ballad of Chyld Dyring, as translated by Sir Walter Scott.

Gibbie's eyes grew wider and wider as he listened; their pupils dilated, and his lips parted: it seemed as if his soul were looking out of door and windows at once--but a puzzled soul that understood nothing of what it saw.

Yet plainly, either the sounds, or the thought-matter vaguely operative beyond the line where intelligence begins, or, it may be, the sparkle of individual word or phrase islanded in a chaos of rhythmic motion, wrought somehow upon him, for his attention was fixed as by a spell.