with whatever creatures haunt the woods. You would have laughed to see
the friends I had among them; yes, among the wild, nimble things, that
reckon man their deadliest enemy! How it was first taught me, I cannot
tell; but there was a charm--a voice, a murmur, a kind of chant--by
which I called the woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the
feathered people, in a language that they seemed to understand."

"I have heard of such a gift," responded the sculptor gravely, "but
never before met with a person endowed with it. Pray try the charm;
and lest I should frighten your friends away, I will withdraw into this
thicket, and merely peep at them."

"I doubt," said Donatello, "whether they will remember my voice now. It
changes, you know, as the boy grows towards manhood."

Nevertheless, as the young Count's good-nature and easy persuadability
were among his best characteristics, he set about complying with
Kenyon's request. The latter, in his concealment among the shrubberies,
heard him send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet
harmonious. It struck the auditor as at once the strangest and the
most natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. Any idle boy,
it should seem, singing to himself and setting his wordless song to
no other or more definite tune than the play of his own pulses,
might produce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as
individual as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it, over and over
again, with many breaks, at first, and pauses of uncertainty; then with
more confidence, and a fuller swell, like a wayfarer groping out
of obscurity into the light, and moving with freer footsteps as it
brightens around him.