bore; and his mind was filled with unaccustomed thought, and a strange
yearning which he did not understand. There was something singularly
attractive about the lad, although his clothes were tattered, his golden
hair and delicate skin were begrimed, his great bright eyes had no
intelligent expression in them, and there was that discontented
undisciplined look about his mouth which is common to uneducated men. He
had no human knowledge, but he had capacity, and he had music, the divine
gift, in his soul, and the voice of an angel to utter it.

What passed through his dim consciousness in the interval which followed
his last remark, no one will ever know; but the chime had once more
sounded; and, suddenly, as he sat there, he took up the strain, and sang
it--and the labourers in the fields, and the loiterers by the river, and
the ladies in their gardens, even the very cattle in the meadows, looked
up and listened, wondering, while he varied the simple melody, as singers
can, finding new meaning in the message, and filling the summer silence
with perfect raptures of ecstatic sound.

It was a voice to gladden the hearts of men, and one who heard it knew
this, and followed the barge, and took the lad and had him taught, so that
in after days the world was ready to fall at his feet and worship the
gift.

And so time passed. Change followed change, but the chime was immutable.
And always, whatever came, it rang out calmly over the beautiful old city
of Morningquest, and entered into it, and was part of the life of it,
mixing itself impartially with the good and evil; with all the sin and
suffering, the pitiful pettiness, the indifference, the cruelty, and every
form of misery-begetting vice, as much as with the purity above reproach,
the charity, the self-sacrifice, the unswerving truth, the patient