A mute boy from the Aberdeen wynds, who owns nothing and is beaten by everyone, walks out of the city and up into the hill farms, where he is taken for an idiot and does more good than any preacher in the book. MacDonald wrote it in 1879 in his own Scots, and his publishers fought him over the dialect for the whole of his career. Gibbie's silence is the device: nobody can argue with him, so they argue with themselves. Fifty-eight plates of painting by David Wilkie and Luke Fildes, ranging across 1725 to 1918, catch the street children, farmhands, and quiet domestic scenes that give Gibbie's wordless world its faces.
