come to that, life has so many experiences, and so
many different sorts of experience. Life, to the man with an open eye,
is just one sequence of many-coloured astonishments. I never could and
never shall understand how it is possible for people to be bored. What
do you say "--he looked towards the piano--"to my singing you a little
song?"

"You 're inimitable--but you 're inimitably exasperating." Miss Sandus
gave him up, with a resigned toss of the head.

"Do sing us a little song," Susanna begged.

He set off, dancing, in the direction of the instrument. But midway
there he stopped, and half turned round, poising, as it were, in his
flight.

"Grave or gay? Sacred or profane?" he asked from over his shoulder.

"Anything--what you will," Susanna answered.

"I 'll sing you a little Ave Maria," he decided. Whereupon, instead of
proceeding, he turned his back squarely upon the piano, and squarely
faced his hearers.

"When a musician composes an Ave Maria," he instructed them, "what he
ought to try for is exactly what those nice old Fifteenth Century
painters in Italy tried for when they painted their Annunciations. He
should try to represent what one would have heard, if one had been
there, just as they tried to represent what one would have seen. Now,
how was it? What would one have heard? What did our Blessed Lady
herself hear? Look. It was the springtime, and it was the end of the
day. And she sat in her garden. And God sent His Angel to announce
the 'great thing' to her. But she must not be frightened. She, so
dear to God, the little maid of fifteen, all wonder and shyness and
innocence, she must not be frightened. She sat in her garden, among
her lilies. Birds were singing round her; the breeze was whispering
lightly in the palm-trees; near-by a brook was plashing; from the
village came the rumour of many voices. All the pleasant, familiar
sounds of nature and of life were in the air. She sat there, thinking
her white thoughts, dreaming her holy day-dreams. And, half as if it
were a day-dream, she saw an Angel come and kneel before her. But she
was not frightened--for it was like a day-dream--and the Angel's face
was so beautiful and so tender and so reverent, she could not have been
frightened, even if it had seemed wholly real. He knelt before her,
and his lips moved, but, as in a dream, silently. All the familiar
music of the world went on--the bird-songs, the whisper of the wind,