with snow, and with snow clinging to its gray-shingled sides like
shreds of wool, seemed to vibrate and pulse and shake, and wax fairly
sonorous with music, like an organ.

Burr Gordon stood still in the road and listened. The constituents of
the concert resolved themselves to his ear. There was a wonderful
soprano, a tenor, a bass, one sweet boy's voice, a bass-viol, and a
violin. They were practising a fugue. The soprano rang out like the
invitation of an angel,

"Come, my beloved, haste away,
Cut short the hours of thy delay,"

above all the others--even the shrill boy-treble. Then it followed,
with noblest and sweetest order, the bass in--

"Fly like a youthful hart or roe,
Over the hills where the spices grow."

The very breath of the spices of Arabia seemed borne into the young
man's senses by that voice. He saw in vision the blue tops of those
delectable hills where the myrtle and the cassia grew; he felt within
his limbs the ardent impulse of the hart or roe. He stood with his
head bent, listening, until the music ceased; the blue hills sank
suddenly into the land of the past, and all the spice-plants withered
away.

There was but a few minutes' interval; then there was a chorus--

"Strike the Timbrel."