THE VOICE OF THE CITY
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. The most striking line of it was this:
"The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man bod-y."
What an inestimable boon it would have been if all the corporeal and
spiritual facts pertaining to man bad thus been tunefully and logically
inculcated in our youthful minds! But what we gained in anatomy, music
and philosophy was meagre.
The other day I became confused. I needed a ray of light. I turned back
to those school days for aid. But in all the nasal harmonies we whined
forth from those bard benches I could not recall one that treated of the
voice of agglomerated mankind.
In other words, of the composite vocal message of massed humanity.