soon you hear no sound of it at all; it is all one motive of the great, still symphony of Silence which Nature is forever playing on her thousand instruments of string and reed.

We had walked some distance without exchanging a word, when Bellwattle stopped and pointed to a small thatched roof that rose above a hollow in the undulating land.

"That's the place," said she.

I stood awhile and looked at it from there. It was the only habitation within sight. Great lines of gorse bushes clustered all around it, dipping down out of view into the hollow below. High above it in the clear air a kestrel hawk hung poised upon the wind and far away along the near line of the land's horizon a man was driving a team of horses with his harrow, while in his wake there followed a glittering white mass of hungry sea-birds, twisting and turning in the air like myriads of paper pieces tossing in the wind.

"Is it always like this?" I asked presently. "Always as big and broad and grand?"

"Always."

"What a brave blast of yellow there will be when the gorse is out!"

"But has color got sound?" said she.

"Sound! Why, when that gorse is all in blossom, it'll be like a thousand silver trumpets ringing their voices all day long."

"And the heather—when that's out? All this place is one mass of purple. What sound has that?"

I shook my head and laughed. It is the habit I have noticed in her before, that habit of taking one too literally when one's mood is serious.

"You're asking me more than I can tell you," said I. "I'm no expert in the classification of colors with the sound of instruments. You'll hear the note of it in your own heart if you listen well enough."

A pensive look came into her eyes. I thought she was trying to see the heather in bloom, to hear in the heart of her that deep warm note of sound which the wealth of its color plays into one's ears. She was endeavoring nothing of the kind; for suddenly she turned to me and, in the most ingenuous way in the world, she asked me why I had never married.

"In the name of God!" said I, "what's that got to do with it?"

"You ought to have married," she continued. 

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