The African, like the oriental, conceives of the scales, and the melodies derived from them, as moving downward, instead of upward like our own. All African music sings downward. Another striking peculiarity is that they lack _tonality_, as the musician would say; that is, they seem not to be in any particular key. The strong feeling of the key-note which characterizes our major scale is entirely absent; and this, of course, accounts for the absence of a well-defined cadence, to which I have alluded. The weird fascination of the African dirge is largely due to this absence of tonality. Musical genius could hardly surpass this instinctive expression of despair—the desolation of an everlasting farewell. The emotion which it represents, however intense, is rather disappointingly transient. Sometimes it is even unreal; I mean to say that it is sometimes indulged for its own sake. And this is true of the Negro everywhere. A few days ago I came upon an article in an old magazine, in which a Southern woman, in “Rambling Talks About the Negro,” tells of a mourning party of Negroes that assembled one night beside her house to finish a mourning ceremony that ought to have been a part of a funeral a few days earlier; but a storm had interrupted it. The unearthly mournfulness of their music was intensified by their beautiful voices until it became unbearable, and the woman bowed her head upon the window sill and cried without restraint, while imagination conjured up fictitious woes, such as the sudden death of her children and of all her friends, until she was alone in a bleak world. Then it occurred to her that it was wrong for people to indulge a voluntary anguish and make a luxury of misery; so she sent a servant to offer a barrel of watermelons to the party of mourners on condition that, instead of mourning, they should dance and jollify; to which they heartily responded, after first making sure that the melons were in good condition, for they really preferred to mourn. When, to the peculiar scales which Africans employ, one adds the further fact that in African music (and indeed in the Negro melodies of our South) the note which corresponds to our seventh in the scale (a step below the tonic) is seldom a true seventh, but is slightly flatted, enough to make a distinct note with a character of its own, one has probably accounted for the peculiar plaintiveness, the elusiveness, the vague mysteriousness, which constitutes the charm of all true Negro music.