to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
song.

All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvae, and purified the
trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and had
fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly to
the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of men;
and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a human
greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper coin.

Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
in his hand and a basket, to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
Visitation of Mary.

He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled to himself as he went
by.

"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
grass and the leaves.

She said nothing; but the darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
came in sight in the distance.

She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth; and laid moss in it, and
put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
handfuls of fallen rose leaves, and with a sprig or two of thyme.

Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad
cries;--who now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now
should rove with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit
with him beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the
leaves?--who now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to
feel the dawn break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the
unborn day?

* * *

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal
soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
thing th