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The caller-out for the moment was a curly-headed lad of twenty, with a shrewd, good-humored face. He stood in a slouching attitude, one shoulder much higher than the other, and as he gave forth, in a singsong voice, his emphatic rhymed directions, his fingers played idly with the red-silk lacings of his brown flannel shirt.

They were jabbering their outlandish tongue up and down the singsong scale as if here before them, sitting on the floor, were a new species of being, newly discovered and strange beyond imagination. Teeny-bits did not know what to make of them; he blinked his eyes and remained sitting there, wondering what would happen next.

This refrain threatening for the third time, three or four of the girls led by Bertha Martin, supplied it in a subdued singsong without waiting for Pastor Lahmann's slow voice. Miriam had scarcely attended to his discourse. He had begun in flat easy tones, describing his visit to Geneva, the snowclad mountains, the quiet lake, the spring flowers.

Meanwhile an Alexandrian slave boy, who had been serving hot water, commenced to imitate a nightingale, and when Trimalchio presently called out, "Change your tune," we had another surprise, for a slave, sitting at Habinnas' feet, egged on, I have no doubt, by his own master, bawled suddenly in a singsong voice, "Meanwhile AEneas and all of his fleet held his course on the billowy deep"; never before had my ears been assailed by a sound so discordant, for in addition to his barbarous pronunciation, and the raising and lowering of his voice, he interpolated Atellane verses, and, for the first time in my life, Virgil grated on my nerves.

"Look here," she said at length, "after this week, it's finished. You either pay me, or...And I sleep very lightly, Monsieur." Her voice took on suddenly its usual sleek singsong tone. Andrews broke away and ran upstairs to his room. "I must fly the coop tonight," he said to himself. But suppose then letters came with money the next day. He writhed in indecision all the afternoon.

Ross snapped it level with the panel, and when it did not snap back, he felt somehow encouraged. When the two levers flanking that button did not push in or move up and down, Ross pulled them out without even waiting to count off. This time he had results! A crackling of noise with a singsong rhythm, the volume of which, low at first, arose to a drone filled the cabin.

As the regular business of the meeting drew to a close one of the members rose, and on being recognized announced that she had a resolution to offer, and read in a high singsong voice: "Be it resolved that this organization of Sisters in Unity indorse the peace movement, and that it use its wide influence to check the tendency toward militarism which injudicious and misguided Americans hope to foist upon the American public."

Nevertheless, this one had missed. A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking at the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears.

And he was jolting and swinging about in the stretcher, clutching hard with his hands at the poles of the stretcher. The pain in his legs grew worse; the rest of his body seemed to shrivel under it. From below him came a rasping voice that cried out at every lurch of the ambulance. He fought against the desire to groan, but at last he gave in and lay lost in the monotonous singsong of his groans.

Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust. I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated from the physiology class.