gedness
and disorder. His hair might never have been straightened out with a
comb; his hands were not politely mentionable; his coarse shoes, which
seemed to have been bought with the agreement that they were never to
wear out, were ill-conditioned with general dust and the special grime
of melted pitch from the typical contractor's cheapened asphalt; one of
his stockings had a fresh rent and old rents enlarged their grievances.

A single sign of victory was better even than the money in the
pocket--the whole lad himself. He was strongly built, frankly
fashioned, with happy grayish eyes, which had in them some of the cold
warrior blue of the sky that day; and they were set wide apart in a
compact round head, which somehow suggested a bronze sphere on a column
of triumph. Altogether he belonged to that hillside of nature, himself a
human growth budding out of wintry fortunes into life's April, opening
on the rocks hardy and all white.

But to sit there swinging his legs--this did not suffice to satisfy his
heart, did not enable him to celebrate his instincts; and suddenly from
his thicket of forest trees and greening bushes he began to pour forth a
thrilling little tide of song, with the native sweetness of some human
linnet unaware of its transcendent gift.

Up the steep hill a man not yet of middle age had mounted from the
flats. He was on his way toward the parapet above. He came on slowly,
hat in hand, perspiration on his forehead; that climb from base to
summit stretches a healthy walker and does him good. At a turn of the
road under the forest trees with shrubbery alongside he stopped
suddenly, as a naturalist might pause with half-lifted foot beside a
dense copse in which some unknown species of bird sang--a young bird
just finding its notes.

It was his vocation to discover and to train voices. His definite work
in music was to help perpetually to rebuild for the world that
ever-sinking bridge of sound over which Faith aids itself in
walking-toward the eternal. This bridge of falling notes is as Nature's
bridge of falling drops: individual drops appear for an instant in the
rainbow, then disappear, but century after century the great arch
stands there on the sky unshaken. So throughout the ages the bridge of
sacred music, in which individual voices are heard a little while and
then are heard no longer, remains for man as one same structure of rock
by which he passes over from the mortal to the immortal.

Su