How often he was wet through and dried again that day, Gibbie could not have told.

He wore so little that either took but a few moments, and he was always ready for a change.

The wind and the rain together were cold, but that only served to let the sunshine deeper into him when it returned.
In the afternoon there was less sun, more rain, and more wind; and at last the sun seemed to give it up; the wind grew to a hurricane, and the rain strove with it which should inhabit the space.

The whole upper region was like a huge mortar, in which the wind was the pestle, and, with innumerable gyres, vainly ground at the rain.
Gibbie drove his sheep to the refuge of a pen on the lower slope of a valley that ran at right angles to the wind, where they were sheltered by a rock behind, forming one side of the enclosure, and dykes of loose stones, forming the others, at a height there was no tradition of any flood having reached.

He then went home, and having told Robert what he had done, and had his supper, set out in the early-failing light, to ascend the mountain.