risings and fallings, the tones and changes and sounds and concords,
pass and repass through the fancy; whereas nothing of the sort can be
left after the warbling of birds, who, as they are not open to our
imitation, cannot move the faculty of imagination within us." (Gassendi,
in _Vita Peireskii_.)

In the garden was plenty of music of the sort that Madam Melcombe still
loved. Peter could not shout in his play without disturbing the storm
cock as he sat up aloft singing a love-song to his wife. As for the
little birds, blackcaps haunted almost every bush, and the timid
white-throat brooded there in peace over her half-transparent eggs.

So no one ever sang in old Madam Melcombe's presence unless Peter forgot
himself, and vexed his mother by chanting out snatches of songs that he
had caught up from the village children. Mrs. Peter Melcombe formed for
herself few theories; she was a woman dull of feeling and slow of
thought; she knew as a fact that her aged relative could not bear music.
So, as a matter of duty and self-interest, she stopped her child's
little voice when she could, and if he asked, "Why does grandmother cry
when I sing?" she would answer, "Nobody knows," for she had not
reflected how those to whom music is always welcome must have neither an
empty heart nor a remorseful conscience, nor keen recollections, nor a
foreboding soul.

Peter was a good little boy enough; he was tolerably well tamed by the
constant presence of old age and, with the restraints it brought upon
him, and having less imagination than falls to the lot of most children,
he was the more affected by his position. When he strayed into a field
of wheat, and there was waving and whispering above his head, it was not
all one to him, as if he had been lost in some old-world forest, where