uld not run divisions with more art
Upon his quaking instrument than she,
The nightingale, did with her various notes
Reply to.

Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
Into a pretty anger, that a bird,
Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
Had busied many hours to perfect practice.
To end the controversy, in a rapture
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,
So many voluntaries, and so quick,
That there was curiosity and cunning,
Concord in discord, lines of differing method
Meeting in one full centre of delight.
The bird (ordain'd to be
Music's first martyr) strove to imitate
These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
Fail'd in, for grief down dropt she on his lute,
And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness
To see the conqueror upon her hearse
To weep a funeral elegy of tears.
He look'd upon the trophies of his art,
Then sigh'd, then wiped his eyes; then sigh'd, and cry'd
"Alas! poor creature, I will soon revenge
This cruelty upon the author of it.
Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
Shall never more betray a harmless peace
To an untimely end:" and in that sorrow,
As he was pashing it against a tree,
I suddenly stept in.'

When I had finished the recitation of this exquisite passage, the sky,
which had been all the afternoon dull and heavy, began to look more
and more threatening; darker clouds, like wreaths of black smoke, flew
across the dead leaden tint; a cooler, damper air blew over the meadows,
and a few large heavy drops splashed in the water. 'We shall have a
storm. Lizzy! May! where are ye? Quick, quick, my Lizzy! run, run!
faster, faster!'

And off we ran; Lizzy not at all displeased at the thoughts of a
wetting, to which indeed she is almost as familiar as a duck; May, on
the other hand, peering up at the weather, and shaking her pretty ears
with manifest dismay. Of all animals, next to a cat, a greyhound dreads
rain. She might have escaped it; her light feet would have borne her
home long before the shower; but May is too faithful for that, too true
a comrade, understands too well the laws of good-fellowship; so she
waited for us. She did, to be sure, gallop on before, and then stop and
look back, and beckon, as it were, with some scorn in her black e