Rarely does an author leave the mark upon his readers in the way that George MacDonald does. And Sir Gibbie is MacDonald at his deep-hearted best.

The story opens with Gibbie, a ragged urchin with little schooling and less care, running about the streets of an old Scottish city, giving what attention he can to his father who was once a man of wealth and position but who has become a poor cobbler. Gibbie, however, is more than a wistful, winning child. Under his shaggy golden hair "looked out two eyes of heaven's own blue, and through the eyes looked out something that dwells behind the sky and every blue thing." After his father dies, Gibbie flees the city. In his sorrow and fearful loneliness, he feels he has nowhere to turn, but he remembers the words that were often on his father's lips. "Up Daurside!" and he follows the course of the river Daur to its source high on the slopes of Glashgar.

It is there that a series of strange adventures befall the little waif—some frightening and terrible like his being beaten by a gamekeeper, some warm and enjoyable like his friendship with Donal Grant, some wonderful and rewarding like his encounter with Donal's parents, Robert and Janet Grant. With Robert, Gibbie tends the sheep on the mountainside; with Janet he learns to read. Janet had but one book in their small cottage and it became Gibbie's primer—"She was his priestess; the opening of her Bible was the opening of a window in heaven; her cottage was the porter's lodge to a temple; his very sheep were feeding on the temple stairs."

How Gibbie comes into his inheritance, returns to the city to study and become a man of the world, and then finally as Sir Gilbert Galbraith returns with his bride to the Galbraiths' ancestral home, is a story that only George MacDonald could tell.

No one who makes the acquaintance of Sir Gibbie will ever forget him. And most readers will return to this haunting book again and again.

From the dust jacket