Sir Gibbie Ch 10 Featured Book Tale Teller Kids Reading Age 15 #greatbooks #classics #teens

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter ten of Sir Gibby. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Anna Roberts. Sir Gibby by George mac Donald, Chapter ten,
The Barn. By this time Gibby had got well up
towards the roots of the hills of Gormgarnet, and the

(00:22):
river had dwindled greatly. He was no longer afraid of it,
but would lie for hours listening to its murmurs over
its pebbly bed, and sometimes even sleep in the hollows
of its banks, or below the willows that overhung it.
Every Here and there a brown rivulet from some peat
bog on a hill, brown and clear, like smoke crystals
molten together flowed into it, and when he had lost

(00:43):
it guided him back to his guide. Farm after farm
he passed here, one widely bordering a valley stream, there
another stretching its skirts up the hillsides till they were
lost in mere heather, where the sheep wandered about, cropping
what strayed grass blades and other eatables they could find.
Lower down, he had passed through small towns and large villages.

(01:03):
Here farms and cottages with an occasional country seat, and
little village of low thatched houses made up the abodes
of men. By this time he had become greatly reconciled
to the loneliness of nature, and was no more afraid
in her solitary presence. At the same time, his heart
had begun to ache and long after the communion of
his kind, for not once since he set out, and

(01:25):
that seemed months, where it was only weeks had he
had an opportunity of doing anything for anybody except indeed,
unfastening the dog's collar, and not to be able to
help was to Gibbey like being dead. Everybody down to
the dogs had been doing for him. And what was
to become of him. It was a state altogether of
servitude into which he had fallen. May had now set in.

(01:48):
But up here among the hills she was May by
courtesy only, or if she was May, she would never
be Might. She was indeed only April, with her showers
and sunshine, her tearful, childish laughter, and again the frown
and the despair irremediable. Nay, as if she still kept
up a secret correspondence with her cousin March, banished for
his rudeness, she would not very seldom shake from her

(02:10):
skirts a snow storm and oftener the dancing hail. Then
out would come the sun behind her, and laugh and say,
I could not help that, But here I am all
the same, coming to you as fast as I can.
The green crops were growing darker, and the trees were
all getting out their nets to catch carbon. The lambs
were frolicking, and in sheltered places the flowers were turning

(02:30):
the earth into a firmament. And now a mere daisy
was enough to delight the heart of Gibbey, his joy
and humanity so suddenly checked, and his thirst for it
left unslaked. He'd begun to see the human look in
the face of the commonest flowers, to love the trusting
stare of the daisy, that gold hearted boy, and the
gentle despondency of the girl harebell dreaming of her mother.

(02:52):
The azure, the wind of which he had scarce thought
as he met at roaming the streets like himself, was
now a friend of his solitude, bringing him sweet odors,
alive with the souls of bees and cooling with bliss
the heat of the long walk, even when it blew cold.
Among the waist moss, waving the heads of the cotton grass,
the only live thing visible. It was a lover, and

(03:13):
kissed him on the forehead. Not that Gibby knew what
a kiss was, any more than he knew about the
souls of bees. He did not remember ever having been kissed.
In that granite city. The women were not much given
to kissing children, even their own. But if they had been,
who of them would have thought of kissing Gibbey. The
baker's wife, kind as she always was to him, would
have thought it defilement to press her lips to those

(03:34):
of the beggar child. And how is any child to
thrive without kisses? The first caresses Gibby ever knew as
such were given to him by Mother Nature herself. It
was only, however, by degrees, though indeed rapid degrees, that
he became capable of them. In the first part of
his journey, he was stunned, stupid, lost in change, Distracted

(03:55):
between a suddenly vanished past and a future slowly dawning.
In the present, he felt little beyond hunger, and that
vague urge up door side, with occasional shoots of pleasure
from kindness, mostly of woman and dog. He was less
shy of the country people by this time, but he
did not care to seek them. He thought them not
nearly so friendly and good as the town people, forgetting

(04:17):
that these knew him and those did not. To Gibbey,
an introduction was the last thing necessary for anyone who
wore a face, and he could not understand why they
looked at him. So whatever is capable of aspiring must
be troubled, that it may wake and aspire, then troubled
still that it may hold fast be itself and a
spire still. One evening, his path vanished between twilight and moonrise,

(04:40):
and just as it became dark, he found himself at
a rough gait through which he saw a field. There
was a pretty tall hedge on each side of the gate,
and he was now a sufficiently experienced traveler to conclude
that he was not far from some human abode. He
climbed the gate and found himself in a field of clover.
It was a splendid big bed, and even had the
night not been warm, he would not have hesitated to

(05:01):
sleep in it. He had never had a cold and
had as little fear for his health as for his life.
He was hungry, it is true. But although food was
doubtless more delicious to such hunger as his that of
the whole body, than it can be to the mere
palate and culinary imagination of an epicure, it was not
so necessary to him that he could not go to
sleep without it. So down he lay in the clover,

(05:23):
and was at once unconscious. When he woke, the moon
was high in the heavens and had melted the veil
of the darkness from the scene of still well ordered comfort.
A short distance from his couch stood a little army
of ricks, between twenty and thirty of them, constructed perfectly
smooth and upright and round and large, each with its
conical top netted in with straw rope, and finished off

(05:46):
with what the herd boy called a tupican, a neatly
tied and trim tuft of the straw with which it
was thatched answering to the stone ball on top of
a gable. Like triangles, their summits stood out against the pale,
blue moon diluted air. They were treasure caves, hollowed out
of space and stored with the best of ammunition against
the armies of hunger and want. But Gibbey, though he

(06:07):
had seen many of them, did not know what they were.
He had seen straw used for the bedding of cattle
and horses, and supposed that the chief end of such ricks.
Nor had he any clear idea that the cattle themselves
were kept for any other object than to make them
comfortable and happy. He had stood behind their houses in
the dark and heard them munching and grinding away even

(06:27):
in the night. Probably the country was for the cattle
as the towns for the men, and that would explain
why the country people were so inferior. While he stood gazing,
a wind arose behind the hills and came blowing down
some glen that opened northwards. Gibbey felt it cold, and
sought the shelter of the ricks. Great and solemn they
looked as he drew nigh near each other, yet enough

(06:49):
apart for plenty of air to flow in etty between.
Over a low wall of unmortared stones, He entered their
ranks above him. As he looked up from their broad base,
they ascended huge as pyramids and peopled the way stair
with giant forms, how warm it was in the round,
winding paths amongst the fruitful piles tombs, these no cenotaphs.

(07:10):
He wandered about them, now in a dusky yellow gloom,
and now in the cold blue moonlight, which they seemed
to warm. At length he discovered that the huge things
were flanked on one side by a long, low house,
in which there was a door horizontally divided into two parts.
Gibbey would fain have got in to try whether the
place was good for sleep, but he found both halves fast.

(07:32):
In the lower half, however, he spied a hole, which,
though not so large, reminded him of the entrance to
the kennel of his dog host. But alas it had
a door too shut from the inside, there might be
some way of opening it. He felt about, and soon
discovered that it was a sliding valve which he could
push to either side. It was, in fact the cat's door,
specially constructed for her convenience of entrance and exit. For

(07:55):
the cat is the guardian of the barn. The grain
which tempts the rats and mice is no tempting to her.
The rats and mice themselves are upon them. She executes justice,
and remains herself an incorruptible because untempted. Therefore a respectable
member of the farm community. Only the dairy door must
be kept shut that has no cat wicket in it.

(08:16):
The hole was a small one, but tempting to the
wee baronet he might perhaps be able to squeeze himself through,
He tried, and succeeded there with some little difficulty. The
moon was there before him, shining through a pane or
two of glass over the door, and by her light
on the hard brown clay floor, Gibbey saw where he was,
though if he had been told he was in the barn,

(08:36):
he would neither have felt nor been at all the wiser.
It was a very old fashioned barn. About a third
of it was floored with wood, dark with age, almost
as brown as the clay for threshing upon with flails.
At that labor two men had been busy during the
most of the preceding day, and that was how in
the same end of the barn rose a great heap

(08:56):
of oat straw, showing in the light of the moon
like a mountain of pale gold. Had Gibbey had any
education in the marvelous he might now in the midnight
and moonlight have well imagined himself in some treasure house
of the Nomes. What he saw in the other corner
was still likeer gold, and was indeed greater than gold,
for it was life. The heap, namely of corn, threshed

(09:18):
from the straw. Gibby recognized this as what he had
seen given to horses. But now the temptation to sleep,
with such facilities presented was overpowering and took from him
all desired to examine further. He shot into the middle
of the loose heap of straw, and vanished from the
glimpses of the moon, Burrowing like a mole in the
heart of the golden warmth. He lay so dry and

(09:40):
comfortable that, notwithstanding his hunger had waked with him, he
was presently in a faster sleep than before. And indeed,
what more luxurious bed, or what bed conducive to softer
slumber was there in the world to find. The moving
moon went down the sky, the cold wind softened and
grew still, The stars swelled out larger. The rats came,

(10:01):
and then came puss, and the rats went with a
scuffle and patter. The pagan gray came in like a
sleep walker, and made the barn dreary as a dull dream.
Then the horses began to fidget with their big feet,
the cattle to low with their great trombone throats, and
the cocks to crow, as if to give warning for
the last time against the devil the world and the flesh.

(10:21):
The men in the adjoining chamber woke, yawned, stretched themselves mightily,
and rose. The god like sun rose after them, and,
entering the barn with them, drove out the gray, and
through it all the orphan lay warm in God's keeping
and his nest of straw, like the butterfly of a
huge chrysalis. When at length Gibbey became once more aware
of existence, it was through a stormy invasion of the

(10:44):
still realm of sleep. The blows of two flails fell,
persistent and quick, following first on the thick head of
the sheaf of oats, untied and cast down before them.
Then grew louder and more deafening, as the oats flew
and the chaff fluttered, and the straw flattened and broke,
thinned and spread, until at last they thundered in great
hard blows on the wooden floor It was the first

(11:06):
of these last blows that shook Gibby awake. What they
were or indicated, he could not tell. He wormed himself
softly round in the straw to look out and see. Now.
Whether it was that sleep was yet heavy upon him
and bewildered his eyes, or that his imagination had, in
dreams been busy with foregone horrors, I cannot tell. But
as he peered through the MUSHes of the crossing and

(11:27):
blinding straws, what he seemed to see was the body
of an old man with disheveled hair, whom, prostrate on
the ground they were beating to death with great sticks.
His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. Not
a sound could he utter, not a finger could he move.
He had no choice but to lie still and witness
the fierce enormity. But it is good that we are

(11:48):
compelled to see some things life among the rest, to
what we call the end of them. By degrees, Gibbey's
sight cleared, the old man faded away, and what was
left of him he could see to be only an
armed full of straw. The next sheaf they threw down,
he perceived under their blows the corn flying out of it,
and began to understand a little. When it was finished,

(12:09):
the corn that had flown dancing from its home like
hail from its cloud, was swept aside to the common heap,
and the straw tossed up on the mound that harbored Gibbey.
It was well that the man with the pitchfork did
not spy his eyes peering out from the midst of
the straw. He might have taken him for some wild
creature and driven the prongs into him. As it was,
Gibby did not altogether like the look of him, and

(12:30):
lay still as a stone. Then another sheaf was unbound
and cast on the floor, and the blows of the
flails began again. It went on thus for an hour
and a half, and Gibbey, although he dropped asleep several times,
was nearly stupid with the noise. The men at length, however,
swept up the corn and tossed the straw for the
last time, and went out. Gibby, judging by his own desires,

(12:53):
thought they must have gone to eat, but did not
follow them, having generally been ordered away the moment he
was seen in a farmyard. He crept out, however, and
began to look about him, first of all, for something
he could eat. The oats looked the most likely, and
he took a mouthful for a trial. He ground at
them severely, but hungry as he was, he failed to
find oats good for food. Their hard husks, their dryness,

(13:16):
their instability, all slipping past each other at every attempt
to crush them with his teeth together, foiled him utterly.
He must search farther. Looking round him afresh, he saw
an open loft, and climbing on the heap in which
he had slept, manage to reach it. It was at
the height of the walls, and the couples of the
roof rose immediately from it. At the farther end was

(13:36):
a heap of hay, which he took for another kind
of straw. Then he spied something he knew. A row
of cheeses lay on a shelf, suspended from the rafters, ripening.
Gibbey knew them well from the shop windows. Knew they
were cheeses and good to eat, though whence and how
they came he did not know. His impression being that
they grew in the fields like turnips. He had still

(13:56):
the notion uncorrected that things in the country belonged to
noble udy in particular, and were mostly for the use
of animals, with which, since he became a wanderer he
had almost come to class himself. He was very hungry.
He pounced upon a cheese and lifted it between its
two hands. It smelled good but felt very hard. That
was no matter what else were teeth made strong and sharp,

(14:17):
for he tried them on one of the round edges,
and nibbling actively, soon got through to the softer body
of the cheese. But he had not got much farther
when he heard the men returning, and desisted. Afraid of
being discovered by the noise, he made. The readiest way
to conceal himself was to lie down flat on the loft,
and he did so just where he could see the
threshing floor over the edge of it by lifting his head. This, however,

(14:40):
he scarcely ventured to do, and all he could see
as he lay was the tip of the swing bar
of one of the flails, ever as it reached the
highest point of its ascent, But to watch for it
very soon ceased to be interesting, and although he had
eaten so little of the cheese, it had yet been
enough to make him dreadfully thirsty. Therefore he greatly desired
to g get away, but he dared not go down

(15:02):
with their sticks. Those men might knock him over in
a moment. So he lay there, thinking of the poor
little hedgehog he had seen on the road as he came,
how he stood watching it, and wishing he had a
suit made of all great pins, which he could set
up when he pleased, And how the driver of a cart,
catching sight of him at the foot of the hedge,
gave him a blow with his whip, and poor fellow,

(15:22):
notwithstanding his clothes of pins, that one blow of a
whip was too much for him. There seemed nothing in
the world but killing. At length he could, unoccupied with
something else, bare his thirst no longer, and swirming round
on the floor, crept softly towards the other end of
the loft to see what was to be seen there.
He found that the heap of hay was not in
the loft at all. It filled a small chamber in

(15:45):
the stable, in fact, And when Gibbey clambered upon it,
what should he see below him on the other side
but a beautiful white horse eating some of the same
sort of stuff he was now lying upon. Beyond, he
could see the backs of more horses, but they were
very different, big and clung and not white. They were
all eating, and this was their food on which he lay.
He wished he too could eat it, and tried, but

(16:07):
found it even less satisfactory than the oats, for it
nearly choked him and set him coughing, so that he
was in considerable danger of betraying his presence to the
men in the barn. How did the horses manage to
get such dry stuff down their throats? But the cheese
was dry too, and he could eat that, no doubt.
The cheese, as well as the fine straw, was there
for the horses. He would like to see the beautiful

(16:28):
white creature down there eat a bit of it, But
with all his big teeth he did not think he
could manage a hole cheese. And how to get a
piece broken off for him with those men there, he
could not devise. It. Would want a long handled hammer,
like those with which he had seen men breaking stones
on the road. A door opened beyond, and a man
came in and led two of the horses out, leaving

(16:50):
the door open. Gibbey clambered down from the top of
the hay into the stall beside the white horse, and
ran out. He was almost in the fields, had not
even a fence to cross. He cast a glance around
and went straight for a neighboring hollow, where, taught by experience,
he hoped to find water. End of Chapter ten.