A chorus of men's voices burst forth. It was strange, weird, enough to make one catch one's breath. Odette listened. That sensitiveness to music which often reached depths in her unknown to herself, was suddenly wrought up to its utmost pitch. She did not know the chorus, and sought in vain for an author to whom to ascribe it. It might be a popular song, perhaps very ancient, to judge by its artless simplicity, its pure rhythm, and its wild, sweet accent. At times a soprano voice uprose in a solo, and the chorus, a third below, responded softly in whisperings that grew nearer and nearer, quickly spreading like oil upon the sea, or as if transmitted from man to man over immense plains and endlessly flowing rivers. Suddenly two or three raucous or strident cries gathered up all the voices to a sharp point directed toward the heavens. Then all sound ceased, and one felt as if falling from a superb altitude into the depths of an abyss. Then the fingers of the enchantress executed a ballad of Balakireff, or Dvorak's hymn, "On the Death of a Hero." And then, after a pause, another chorus broke forth. There was in it all a melancholy which no words could so much as suggest, in which amid the uniformly plaintive murmur one discerned such lifelike wailings that one could have stretched out the hands to succor these vague, unrecognized, and multiplied sufferings. They swelled, spread abroad, took on so mighty an extension that in spite of oneself one saw the surface of the suffering world, heard the feeble and resigned voice of man, of man always the sport of fate, always in leading-strings, always sacrificed like cattle to gods whose secret he could not fathom. It was the lament of the ancient earth of humanity, timid, uncouth, and despairing, issuing from bruised hearts, from torn flesh, from souls robbed of their innocent ideals, a disturbing lament issuing from the borders of marshes, from forests, from glacial plains, from desert steppes, from nameless villages, prisons, palaces, battlefields, tombs, and stoically, pathetically, and yet childishly addressed to--no one!