of its oft-tried nature excited
more than half my admiration, and all my love.

Walpurgis on the ceiling, gray coming on in the embers, symptoms
of death in the candle, a blotch of tallow on the Shakespeare,
and the coat not half done. It must have been about then,
I think, that the thin-edged sweetness of the Singing Mouse's
voice pierced keenly through the air. I was right glad when the
little creature came and sat on my knee, and in its affectionate
way began to nibble at my finger-tips. It sat erect, its thin
paws waving with a tiny, measured swing, and in its mystic
voice, so infinitely small, so sweet and yet so majestically
strong, began a song which no pen can transcribe. Knowing that
the awakening must come, but unwilling to lose a moment of the
dream, I, who with one finger could have crushed the little
thing, sat prizing it more and more, as more and more its voice
swept, and swelled, and rang; rang, till the fire burst high in
noble pyramids of flame; rang, till the candle flashed in a
thousand crystals; swelled, till the walls fell silently apart,
and showed that all this time I had been sitting ignorant of,
but yet within a grand and stately hall, whose polished sides
bore speaking canvas and noble marbles; swept up and around,
till every stately niche, and every tapestried corner, and every
lofty dome rang gently back in mellow music--all for the Singing
Mouse and me....

Small wizard, it was fell cunning of ye so to paint upon the
wall this picture of the old mill-dam. How naturally the wooded
hill slopes back beyond the mill! And how, with the same old
sleepy curves, the river winds on back. How green the trees--how
very green! Ah, Singing Mouse, they do not mix that color now.
And nowhere do wide bottom-lands wave and sing in such seemly
grace, so decked with yellow flowers, with odd sweet william and
the small wild rose. And nowhere now on earth, I know, is there
any stream to murmur so sweetly and so comfortably, to say such
words to any dreaming boy, to babble of a work well done, of
conscience clear and of a success and happiness to come. All
that was in the river. If I listen very hard, and imagine very
high and very deep, I can almost pretend to hear them now, those
old words, heard when I was young. The voices are there, I doubt
not, and there are other boys. God keep them boys always, and
may they dream not backward, but ahead!

This lazy pool beneath the far wing of the dam, how smooth