d? My father, from whose book, _The Veiled Queen_, the extract
with which this chapter opens is taken, would, unhesitatingly,
have answered 'Yes.'

'Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama concerns itself only with the
great,' says he, in that wonderful book of his. 'But who are the
great? With the unseen powers, mysterious and imperious, who govern
while they seem not to govern all that is seen, who are the great? In
a world where man's loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences
childish dreams, where his highest knowledge is ignorance, where his
strongest strength is to heaven a derision--who are the great? Are
they not the few men and women and children on the earth who greatly
love?'

II

So sweet a sound as that childish voice I had never heard before.
I held my breath and listened.

Into my very being that child-voice passed, and it was a new music
and a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there
is not in nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap
has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so
full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on
a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any
human words. But here was a note sweet and soft as that, and yet
charged with a richness no blackcap's song had ever borne, because no
blackcap has ever felt the joys and sorrows of a young human soul.

The voice was singing in a language which seemed strange to me then,
but has been familiar enough since:

Bore o'r cymwl aur,
Eryri oedd dy gaer.
Bren o wyllt a gwar,
Gwawr ysbrydau.[Footnote]

[Footnote: Morning of the golden cloud,
Eryrl was thy castle,
King of the wild and tame,
Glory of the spirits of air!]

[Eryri--the Place of Eagles, i.e. Snowdon.]

Intense curiosity now made me suddenly forget my troubles. I
scrambled back through the trees not tar from that spot and looked
around. There, sitting upon a grassy grave, beneath one of the
windows of the church, was a little girl, somewhat younger than
myself apparently. With her head bent back she was gazing up at the
sky and singing, while one of her little hands was pointing to a tiny
cloud that hovered like a golden feather over her head. The sun,
which had suddenly become very bright, shining on her glossy hair
(for sh