But above all the voices there rose one sweetest and clearest of all, and going up into heaven, as it seemed, as a lark's does on a summer morning. He was only a little fellow that sang — a little boy of the Lastra a Signa, poorer than all the rest; with his white frock clean, but very coarse, and a wreath of scarlet poppies on his auburn curls; a very little fellow, ten years old at most, with thin brown limbs and a lean wistful face, and the straight brows of his country, with dark eyes full of dreams beneath them, and naked feet that could be fleet as a hare's over the dry yellow grass or the crooked sharp stones.
He was always hungry, and never very strong, and certainly simple and poor as a creature could be, and he knew what a beating meant as well as any dog about the farm. He lived with people who thrashed him oftener than they fed him. He was almost always scolded, and bore the burden of others' faults. He had never had a whole shirt or a pair of shoes in all his life. He kept goats on one of the dusky sweet-scented hillsides above Signa, and bore, like them, the wind and the weather, the scorch and the storm. And yet, by God's grace and the glory of childhood, he was happy enough as he went over the bridge and through the white dust, chanting his psalm in the rear of the priests, in the ceremonies of the Corpus Domini.
For the music was in his head and in his heart; and the millions of leaves and the glancing water seemed to be singing with him, and he did not feel the flints under his feet, or the heat of them, as he went singing out all his little soul to the river and the sky and the glad June sunshine, and he was quite happy, though he was of no more moment in the human world than any one of the brown grilli in the wheat, or tufts of rosemary in the quarry-side; and he did not feel the sharpness of the stones underneath his feet or the scorch of them as he went barefoot along the streets, because he was always looking up at the brightness of the sky, and expecting to see it open and to see the faces of the curly-headed winged children peep out from behind the sun-rays as they did in the old pictures in the villa chapels.
The priests told him he would see them for a certainty if he were good; and he had been good, or at least had tried to be, but the heavens never had opened yet.
It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you. — Ouida, Signa

Because he was alone

He became the world we see,

At the root of the earth, there is Kanaloa

In the earth rocks, there is he,

Kanaloa, great voice of the ocean

— Fragment from a Hawaiian myth