Yet here I am, capable of pleasure unspeakable from that and many another ballad, old and new! somehow, at one time or another, or at many times in one, I have at last come awake! When, by slow filmy unveilings, life grew clearer to Gibbie, and he not only knew, but knew that he knew, his thoughts always went back to that day in the meadow with Donal Grant as the beginning of his knowledge of beautiful things in the world of man.

Then first he saw nature reflected, Narcissus-like, in the mirror of her humanity, her highest self.
But when or how the change in him began, the turn of the balance, the first push towards life of the evermore invisible germ--of that he remained, much as he wondered, often as he searched his consciousness, as ignorant to the last as I am now.

Sometimes he was inclined to think the glory of the new experience must have struck him dazed, and that was why he could not recall what went on in him at the time.
Donal rose and went driving the cattle home, and Gibbie lay where he had again thrown himself upon the grass.

When he lifted his head, Donal and the cows had vanished.
Donal had looked all round as he left the meadow, and seeing the boy nowhere, had concluded he had gone to his people.

The impression he had made upon him faded a little during the evening.