With what skill and breath they had, they set up a choral strain,--"Hail, Columbia!" we believe, which those old Roman echoes must have found it exceeding difficult to repeat aright.

Even Hilda poured the slender sweetness of her note into her country's song.

Miriam was at first silent, being perhaps unfamiliar with the air and burden.

But suddenly she threw out such a swell and gush of sound, that it seemed to pervade the whole choir of other voices, and then to rise above them all, and become audible in what would else have been thee silence of an upper region.

That volume of melodious voice was one of the tokens of a great trouble.