ally do is to
observe and more or less give names to the miracles. They can't explain
'em."

"It is great pleasure to watch such things," said Annunziata. "It is a
great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own
eyes."

"So it is," agreed John. "And if you keep your eyes well open, there's
not a minute of the livelong day when you mayn't see one."

"It is very strange," said Annunziata, "but when the sun shines, then I
love the sunny weather, and am glad that it does not rain. Yet when it
does rain, then I find that I love the rain too, that I love it just as
much as the sun,--it is so fresh, it smells so good, the raindrops are
so pretty, and they make such a pretty sound where they fall, and the
grey light is so pleasant."

"Our loves," said John, "are always very strange. Love is the rummest
miracle of them all. It is even more difficult to account for than the
formation of clouds on the hillside."

"We love the things that give us pleasure," said Annunziata.

"And the people, sometimes, who give us pain," said John.

"We love the people, first of all, who are related to us," said
Annunziata, "and then the people we see a great deal of--just as I love,
first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook."

"Who brings in the inevitable veal," said John. "Thank you, Honeymouth."
He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata's grave eyes wondered what he was
laughing at. "But it isn't every one," he pointed out, "who has your
solid and well-balanced little head-piece. It isn't every one who keeps
his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of
reason. Some of us love first of all people who aren't related to us in
the remotest degree, and people we've seen hardly anything of and know
next to nothing about."

Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head.

"It is foolish to love people we know nothing about," she declared, in
her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment.

"True enough," said John. "But what would you have? Some of us are born
to folly, as the sparks fly upward. You see, there's a mighty difference
between love and love. There's the love which is affection, there's the
love which is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply
love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has
its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope
of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the