he played it,
and then a low cry came from her lips. Again she touched it, and her
eyes, though blind, seemed for an instant to flame like fire. Then, with
both her hands she clung to it, and with her lips and her tongue she
kissed it, while her whole body quivered like a reed in the wind.

Israel saw what she did, and his very soul trembled at the sight with
wild thoughts that did not dare to take the name of hope. As well as he
could in the confusion of his own senses he stepped forward to draw the
little maiden back but the wife of the Governor called on him to leave
her.

"Leave her!" she cried. "Let us see what the child will do!"

At that moment Ali's playing came to as end, and the boy let the harp
pass to Naomi's clinging fingers, and then, half sitting, half kneeling
on the ground beside it, the girl took it to herself. She caressed it,
she patted it with her hand, she touched its strings, and then a faint
smile crossed her rosy lips. She laid her cheek against it and touched
its strings again, and then she laughed aloud. She flung off her
slippers and the garment that covered her beautiful arms, and laid
her pure flesh against the harp wheresoever her flesh might cling, and
touched its strings once more, and then her very heart seemed to laugh
with delight.

Now, what is to follow will seem to be no better than a superstitious
saying, but true it is, nevertheless, and simple sooth for all it sounds
so strange, that though Naomi was deaf as the grave, and had never yet
heard music, and though she was untaught and knew nothing of the notes
of a harp to strike them yet she swept the strings to strange sounds
such as no man had ever listened to before and none could follow.

It was not music that the little maiden made to her ear, but only motion
to her body, and just as the deaf who are deaf alone are sometimes found
to take pleasure in all forms of percussion, and to derive from them
some of the sensations of sound--the trembling of the air after thunder,
the quivering of the earth after cannon, and the quaking of vast walls
after the ringing of mighty bells--so Naomi, who was blind as well and
had no sense save touch, found in her fingers, which had gathered up the
force of all the other senses, the power to reproduce on this instrument
of music the movement of things that moved about her--the patter of the
leaves of the fig-tree in the patio of her home, the swirl of the great
winds on the hill-top, the