ny how we
can sing. Listen!"

And I listened to the strangest, wildest, and sweetest singing I ever had
heard,--the singing of Lurleis, of sirens, of witches. First, one
damsel, with an exquisitely clear, firm voice, began to sing a verse of a
love-ballad, and as it approached the end the chorus stole in, softly and
unperceived, but with exquisite skill, until, in a few seconds, the
summer breeze, murmuring melody over a rippling lake, seemed changed to a
midnight tempest, roaring over a stormy sea, in which the _basso_ of the
_kalo shureskro_ (the black captain) pealed like thunder. Just as it
died away a second girl took up the melody, very sweetly, but with a
little more excitement,--it was like a gleam of moonlight on the still
agitated waters, a strange contralto witch-gleam; and then again the
chorus and the storm; and then another solo yet sweeter, sadder, and
stranger,--the movement continually increasing, until all was fast, and
wild, and mad,--a locomotive quickstep, and then a sudden
silence--sunlight--the storm had blown away.

Nothing on earth is so like magic and elfin-work as when women burst
forth into improvised melody. The bird only "sings as his bill grew," or
what he learned from the elders; yet when you hear birds singing in
woodland green, throwing out to God or the fairies irrepressible floods
of what seems like audible sunshine, so well does it match with summer's
light, you think it is wonderful. It is mostly when you forget the long
training of the prima donna, in her ease and apparent naturalness, that
her song is sweetest. But there is a charm, which was well known of old,
though we know it not to-day, which was practiced by the bards and
believed in by their historians. It was the feeling that the song was
born of the moment; that it came with the air, gushing and fresh from the
soul. In reading the strange stories of the professional bards and
scalds and minstrels of the early Middle Age, one is constantly
bewildered at the feats of off-hand composition which were exacted of the
poets among Celts or Norsemen. And it is evident enough that in some
mysterious way these singers knew how to put strange pressure on the
Muse, and squeeze strains out of her in a manner which would have been
impossible at present.

Yet it lingers here and there on earth among wild, strange people,--this
art of making melody at will. I first heard it among Nubian boatmen on
the Nile. It was as manifest