Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of music.
They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which Myrtle, who was
a natural singer, was expected to bear her part. This would have been
pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected had been cheerful or
soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of a sort to inspire a love
for what was lovely in this life, and to give some faint foretaste of the
harmonies of a better world to come. But there is a fondness for minor
keys and wailing cadences common to the monotonous chants of cannibals
and savages generally, to such war-songs as the wild, implacable
"Marseillaise," and to the favorite tunes of low--spirited Christian
pessimists. That mournful "China," which one of our most agreeable
story-tellers has justly singled out as the cry of despair itself, was
often sung at The Poplars, sending such a sense of utter misery through
the house, that poor Kitty Fagan would cross herself, and wring her
hands, and think of funerals, and wonder who was going to die,--for she
fancied she heard the Banshee's warning in those most dismal ululations.

On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and came
dome with her hands full of leaves and blossoms. Silence Withers looked
at them as if they were a kind of melancholy manifestation of frivolity
on the part of the wicked old earth. Not that she did not inhale their
faint fragrance with a certain pleasure, and feel their beauty as none
whose souls are not wholly shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the
world was, in her estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a
momentary forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.

Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost