Gibbie gazed and wondered; and while he gazed--slowly, glidingly, back to his mind came the ghost-mother of the ballad, and in every daisy he saw her folding her neglected orphans to her bosom, while the darkness and the misery rolled by defeated.

He wished he knew a ghost that would put her arms round him.

He must have had a mother once, he supposed, but he could not remember her, and of course she must have forgotten him.

He did not know that about him were folded the everlasting arms of the great, the one Ghost, which is the Death of death--the life and soul of all things and all thoughts.

The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him.