Perhaps the fear was but the shadow of his new-born aversion to the place where he had seen those best-loved countenances change so suddenly and terribly--cease to smile, but not cease to stare.
That second day he fared better, too, than the first; for he came on a family of mongrel gipsies, who fed him well out of their kettle, and, taken with his looks, thought to keep him for begging purposes.
But now that Gibbie's confidence in human nature had been so rudely shaken, he had already begun, with analysis unconscious, to read the human countenance, questioning it; and he thought he saw something that would hurt, in the eyes of two of the men and one of the women.
Therefore, in the middle of the night, he slipped silently out of the tent of rags, in which he had lain down with the gipsy children, and ere the mothers woke, was a mile up the river.
But I must not attempt the detail of this part of his journey.

It is enough that he got through it.

He met with some adventures, and suffered a good deal from hunger and cold.

Had he not been hardy as well as fearless he must have died.

But, now from this quarter, now from that, he got all that was needful for one of God's birds.