e set about complying with
Kenyon's request. The latter, in his concealment among the shrubberies,
heard him send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet
harmonious. It struck the auditor as at once the strangest and the
most natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. Any idle boy,
it should seem, singing to himself and setting his wordless song to
no other or more definite tune than the play of his own pulses,
might produce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as
individual as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it, over and over
again, with many breaks, at first, and pauses of uncertainty; then with
more confidence, and a fuller swell, like a wayfarer groping out
of obscurity into the light, and moving with freer footsteps as it
brightens around him.

Anon, his voice appeared to fill the air, yet not with an obtrusive
clangor. The sound was of a murmurous character, soft, attractive,
persuasive, friendly. The sculptor fancied that such might have been
the original voice and utterance of the natural man, before the
sophistication of the human intellect formed what we now call language.
In this broad dialect--broad as the sympathies of nature--the human
brother might have spoken to his inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the
woods, or soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible to such extent
as to win their confidence.

The sound had its pathos too. At some of its simple cadences, the tears
came quietly into Kenyon's eyes. They welled up slowly from his heart,
which was thrilling with an emotion more delightful than he had often
felt before, but which he forbore to analyze, lest, if he seized it, it
should at once perish in his grasp.

Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed to listen,--then,
recommencing, he poured his spirit and life more earnestly into the
strain. And finally,--or else the sculptor's hope and imagination
deceived him,--soft treads were audible upon the fallen leaves. There
was a rustling among the shrubbery; a whir of wings, moreover, that
hovered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied
that he could distinguish the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small
forest citizen, and that he could even see its doubtful shadow, if not
really its substance. But, all at once, whatever might be the reason,
there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of little feet; and then the
sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful cry, and through the crevices