“I was just about to git up and go home, bein’ tired of that foolishness, when I heard a little bird waking away off in the woods, and callin’ sleepy-like to his mate, and I looked up, and I see that Rubin was beginnin’ to take some interest in his business, and I set down agin.  It was the peep of the day.  The light came faint from the east, the breeze blowed gentle and fresh, some birds waked up in the orchard, then some more in the trees near the house, and all begun singin’ together.  People began to stir, and the gal opened the shutters.  Just then the first beam of the sun fell upon the blossoms a leetle more, and it techt the roses on the bushes, and the next thing it was the broad day:  the sun fairly blazed, the birds sang like they’d split their throats; all the leaves were movin’ and flashin’ diamonds of dew, and the whole wide world was bright and happy as a king.  Seemed to me like there was a good breakfast in every house in the land, and not a sick child or woman anywhere.  It was a fine mornin’.

“And I says to my neighbour, ‘That’s music, that is.’

“But he glared at me like he’d cut my throat.

“Presently the wind turned; it began to thicken up and a kind of thick grey mist came over things; I got low-spirited directly.  Then a silver rain began to fall.  I could see the drops touch the ground, some flashed up like long pearl earrings, and the rest rolled away like rubies.  It was pretty, but melancholy.  Then the pearls gathered themselves into long strands and necklaces, and then they melted into thin silver streams running between golden gravels, and then the streams joined each other at the bottom of the hill, and made a brook that flowed silent, except that you could kinder see music, especially when the bushes on the bank moved as the music went along down the valley.  I could smell the flowers in the meadow.  But the sun didn’t shine nor the birds sing; it was a foggy day, but not cold.

“The most curious thing was the little white angel boy, like you see in pictures, that run ahead of the music brook, and led it on and on, away out of the world, where no man ever was—­I never was, certain.  I could see the boy just the same as I see you.  Then the moonlight came, without any sunset, and shone on the graveyards, over the wall, and between the black, sharp-top trees splendid marble houses rose up, with fine ladies in the lift-up windows, and men that loved ’em, but never got a-nigh ’em, and played on guitars under the trees, and made me that miserable I could a-cried, because I wanted to love somebody, I don’t know who, better than the men with guitars did.