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seeing I did not begin, cast a look of reproof on me, and started off in a high-pitched wavering voice that seemed to have had all its fulness blown away by wear and tear of storms and toil at sea. I felt so sorry for him—for his weather-beaten face, and his worn old voice, and his wooden leg,—above all, he sang so terribly out of tune, that all at once, without my knowing it, a voice that surely never belonged to me—it was so delightfully sweet and full of power—took up the words and sang

from beginning to end, to the astonishment of the fields and the dark forest slopes which heard the solemn words for the first time in their lives. While we were singing, as if an angel of life moved over the land, a great gold wing of sunlight swept over the hills and then faded away into the still, grey, mild, over-clouded evening, more like autumn than spring.

“But I feel spring stirring in my heart now! I can sing again. George Eliot says somewhere, ‘The soul that was born again to music might wake again to love’—or something to that effect. I can well believe it!