"
The man went up and the boy went down.
The man, having climbed to the parapet, leaned over the stone wall. The
tops of some of the tall poplar-trees, rooted far below, were on a level
with his eyes. Often he stopped there to watch them swaying like upright
plumes against the wind. They swayed now in the silvery April air with a
ripple of silvery leaves. His eyes sought out intimately the barely
swollen buds on the boughs of other forest trees yet far from leaf. They
lingered on the white blossoms of the various shrubs. They found the
pink hawthorn; in the boughs of one of those trees one night in England
in mid-May he had heard the nightingale, master singer of the non-human
world. Up to him rose the enchanting hillside picture of grass and moss
and fern. It was all like a sheet of soft organ music to his
nature-reading eyes.
While he gazed, he listened. Down past the shadows and the greenness,
through the blossoms and the light, growing fainter and fainter, went a
wandering little drift of melody, a haunting, unidentified sound under
the blue cathedral dome of the sky. He reflected again that he had never
heard anything like it. It was, in truth, a singing soul.
Then he saw the lad's sturdy figure bound across the valley to join
friends in play on the thoroughfare that skirts the park alongside the
row of houses.
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