thrilling little tide of song, with the native sweetness of some human
linnet unaware of its transcendent gift.

Up the steep hill a man not yet of middle age had mounted from the
flats. He was on his way toward the parapet above. He came on slowly,
hat in hand, perspiration on his forehead; that climb from base to
summit stretches a healthy walker and does him good. At a turn of the
road under the forest trees with shrubbery alongside he stopped
suddenly, as a naturalist might pause with half-lifted foot beside a
dense copse in which some unknown species of bird sang--a young bird
just finding its notes.

It was his vocation to discover and to train voices. His definite work
in music was to help perpetually to rebuild for the world that
ever-sinking bridge of sound over which Faith aids itself in
walking-toward the eternal. This bridge of falling notes is as Nature's
bridge of falling drops: individual drops appear for an instant in the
rainbow, then disappear, but century after century the great arch
stands there on the sky unshaken. So throughout the ages the bridge of
sacred music, in which individual voices are heard a little while and
then are heard no longer, remains for man as one same structure of rock
by which he passes over from the mortal to the immortal.

Such was his life-work. As he now paused and listened, you might have
interpreted his demeanor as that of a professional musician whose ears
brought tidings that greatly astonished him. The thought had at once
come to him of how the New York papers once in a while print a story of
the accidental finding in it of a wonderful voice--in New York, where
you can find everything that is human. He recalled throughout the
history of music instances in which some one of the world's famous