bless ... Miriam...."

Yet through it all ran that exquisite memory of the calling of his true
name in the spaces of his soul. The beauty of far-off unattainable
things hovered like a star above his head, so that he went about the
house with an insatiable yearning in his heart, a perpetual smile of
wonder upon his face, and in his eyes a gleam that was sometimes terror,
sometimes delight.

It was almost as if some great voice called to him from the mountaintops,
and the little chap was forever answering in his heart, "I'm coming! I'm
coming!" and then losing his way purposely, or hiding behind bushes on
the way for fear of meeting the great invisible Caller face to face.

II

And, meanwhile, the house became for him a kind of Sound-Temple as it
were, protected from desecration by the hills and desolate spaces that
surrounded it. From dawn to darkness its halls and corridors echoed with
the singing violin, Skale's booming voice, Miriam's gentle tones, and his
own plaintive yet excited note, while outside the old grey walls the air
was ever alive with the sighing of the winds and the ceaseless murmur of
falling water. Even at night the place was not silent. He understood at
last what the clergyman had told him--that perfect silence does not
exist. The universe, down to its smallest detail, sings through every
second of time.

The sounds of nature especially haunted him. He never heard the wind now
without thinking of lost whispers from the voice of God that had strayed
down upon the world to sweeten and bewilder the hearts of men--whispers
a-search for listeners simple enough to understand. And when their walks
took them as far as the sea, the dirge of the waves troubled his soul
with a kind of distressing exaltation that afflicted the very deeps of
his being. It was with a new comprehension he understood his employer's
dictum that the keynote of external nature was middle F--this employer
who himself possessed that psychic sense of absolute pitch--and that the
roar of a city, wind in forest trees, the cry of trains, the rushing of
rivers and falling water, Niagara itself, all produced this single
utterance; and he loved to sing it on the moors, Miriam laughing by his
side, and to realize that the world, literally, sang with them.

Behind all sounds he divined for the first time a majesty that appalled;
his imagination, glorified by Skale, instantly fell to constructing the
forms they bodied forth. Out of doors t