Donal read it a third time, and closed the book, for it was almost the hour for driving the cattle home.

He had never yet seen, and perhaps never again did see, such a look of thankful devotion on human countenance as met his lifted eyes.
How much Gibbie even then understood of the lovely eerie old ballad, it is impossible for me to say.

Had he a glimmer of the return of the buried mother?
Did he think of his own?
I doubt if he had ever thought that he had a mother; but he may have associated the tale with his father, and the boots he was always making for him.
Certainly it was the beginning of much.

But the waking up of a human soul to know itself in the mirror of its thoughts and feelings, its loves and delights, oppresses me with so heavy a sense of marvel and inexplicable mystery, that when I imagine myself such as Gibbie then was, I cannot imagine myself coming awake.

I can hardly believe that, from being such as Gibbie was the hour before he heard the ballad, I should ever have come awake.