Our American wonderlands

Foreword

Few Americans know their own land even in a cursory way. The Alps are not to be known by railway travelers, nor can the Sierras be studied " from a car-window." With its two thousand years or more of culture and material progress there are many parts of Europe that can be seen only by those who are willing to leave the beaten tracks. Many of the trails of the United States are still fresh and newly-trodden, yet the wonders and marvels they reach are far beyond what the Old World has to offer. In everything, save the products of man's industry, genius, and energy, this country affords far more to see than does Europe. Our "Wonderlands" are more startling, more varied, more alluring, more attractive.

Hence, while the war now raging between the great civilized nations of Europe is to be deplored, it will serve one good purpose, at least, if it leads Americans to a keener, truer patriotism, manifested in a desire to see and better know their own country. He is no true American — from my standpoint — who will seize every opportunity to cross the Atlantic before he has crossed the prairies, the Rockies, the sage-brush deserts, and the Sierras of his own land. Once let Americans know and exalt the glories of American scenery as they do those of European scenery, and the United States will begin to take its proper and appointed place among the countries of the world as the possessor of many gifts and most wonderful allurements.

FOREWORD

In the following pages I have sought, briefly and vividly, without entering into too much detail, to give the reader living glimpses of what America offers of antiquarian, scenic, geologic, and ethnologic interest. The cliff dwellings of Colorado and Arizona are just as fascinating as the castles of the Rhine, when one comprehends their story; the Hopis, Havasupais, Apaches, and Navahos are more picturesque than the Swiss, Irish, Servian, or Russian peasants, and their social and religious ceremonies far more wonderful and fascinating; the Natural Bridges of Utah, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the Canyon de Chelly, Havasu Canyon, the Yosemite Valley, the Yellowstone and a hundred other scenic glories of our Western World far surpass in variety and marvel anything Europe has to offer.

The Colorado and Mohave Deserts, the High Sierras, the Channel Islands of California, Lake Tahoe and its glacial surroundings, are equally fascinating as their counterparts in the Old World, and the glaciers of the Alps are not more wonderful and alluring than those of the Glacier National Park of Montana, and the Cascade and other western ranges.

It by no means reflects credit on our citizens that, when they are questioned in Europe " I suppose, of course, you know the Yosemite, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, the Hopi Villages, Meteorite Mountain, the Roosevelt Dam, the Yellowstone Park, Glacier National Park, the Mammoth Cave, the Great Bridges of Utah, the Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly, etc., etc.," they are compelled to answer, " No ! I have seen none of them — or, at best, only the ones that are reached easiest by railroad."

FOREWORD

To excite interest in these wonderlands of our own country is my avowed purpose, with the deliberate intent of making the slogan SEE AMERICA FIRST a potent one in active and daily operation in the minds of all intelligent Americans. To increase travel in these directions will be my reward, for thus I know I shall add largely to the measure of satisfaction enjoyed by my fellow-citizens in the increased knowledge of their own great and wonderful land. ^*

Pasadena, California,

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Grand Canyon of Arizona .... I II Old Taos and the Flagellantes II

III The Prehistoric Cliff- and Cave-Dwellings of

Chapter I The Grand Canyon Of Arizona

AS THERE is but one Niagara, one Yosemite, one Lake Tahoe, one Yellowstone, so there is but one Grand Canyon. While the name has often been applied to lesser gorges, it is a sacrilege that should not be tolerated as an act of lese majesty against the one supreme gorge of the known world. Supreme, indeed, it is, in size — width, depth, and length — in infinite variety of sculptured forms and their dimensions, in the gamut of color revealed, in the geological strata exposed, in the problems involved, and in the vastness of the gieat river, which, working through the patient ages, has been the chief instrument of its manufacture, and now angrily, sullenly, noisily, sometimes quietly, at others thunderingly and blusteringly, dashes on its way to the far-away open desert, and later to the open sea.

There are writers who have sought to compare the Grand Canyon with other objects of natural scenery; but this is only to aid the imagination of those who yet have the pleasure before them of making its acquaintance. You cannot compare things of such differences. John Muir once wrote illuminatingly on this subject. He said :

It is impossible to conceive what the Canyon is, or what impression it makes, from the descriptions or pictures, however good. Naturally it is untellable even to those who have seen something perhaps a little like it on a small scale in this same plateau region. One's most extravagant expectations are indefinitely surpassed, though one expects much from what is said of it as "the biggest chasm on earth."

So big is it that all other big things — Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids, Chicago — all would be lost if tumbled into it.

Naturally enough, illustrations as to size are sought for among other canyons like or unlike it, with the common result of worse confounding confusion. The prudent keep silent. It was once said that the "Grand Canyon could put a dozen Yosemites in its vest pocket.

The justly famous Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is, like that of the Colorado, gorgeously colored and abruptly countersunk in a plateau, and both are mainly the work of water. But the Colorado's Canyon is more than a thousand times larger, and as a score or two new buildings of ordinary size would not change appreciably the general view of a great city, so hundreds of Yellowstones might be crowded in the sides of the Colorado Canyon without noticeably augmenting its size or the richness of its sculpture. But it is not true that the great Yosemite rocks would be thus lost or hidden. Nothing of their kind in the world, so far as I know, rivals El Capitan and Tissiack (Half Dome), much less dwarfs or in any way belittles them. None of the sandstone or limestone precipices of the Canyon that I have seen or heard of approaches in smooth, flawless strength and grandeur the granite face of El Capitan or the Tenaya side of Cloud's Rest. These colossal cliffs, types of permanence, are about three thousand and six hundred feet high; those of the Canyon that are sheer are about half as high, and are types of fleeting change; while glorious-domed Tissiack, noblest of mountain buildings, far from being overshadowed or lost in this rosy, spring canyon company, would draw every eye, and, in serene majesty, "aboon them a'," she would take her place — castle, temple, palace, or tower.

Every feature of nature's big face is beautiful — height, hollow, wrinkle, furrow, and line — and this is the main master

Copyright by Fred Harvey

THE GRAND CANYON

PLATEAU VIEW THIRTEEN HUNDRED FEET ABOVE THE COLORADO

GRAND CANYON OF ARIZONA 3

furrow of its kind on our continent, incomparably greater and more impressive than any other yet discovered, or likely to be discovered, now that all the great rivers have been traced to their heads.*

There are several features of the canyon that immediately force themelves upon the attention of the observer. The first is the stupendous vastness of the chasm into which one gazes. Few people have any standard with which to compare it. The ordinary canyons, or ravines, into which one may have gazed are so puny and insignificant as not to count in the tremendous impression now produced. As one reads the account of emotions experienced in gazing into other depths — as, for instance, Porte Crayon's description of the thrilling sensations experienced by his sisters at the Natural Bridge of Virginia, given in Chapter xxix, one realizes how utterly incompetent words are to suggest what one feels in the presence of this really sublime abyss. All the superlatives of the language have been exhausted on objects so insignificant as to be unobservable were they alongside of this great Canyon.

Then, too, the vastness of this deep inferno is entirely different from the vastness of a valley that one gazes into from a mountain height. The actual depth may be as great in the latter case as the five thousand feet descent into the Canyon, but the valley is not shut in, is not a wild desolation of highly colored and picturesquely sculptured rocks. The two depths are entirely alike. Hence analysis shows that the effect of vast depth of wide extent is enhanced by the fact of the uniqueness of the scene. It is different in this

* The Grand Canyon of the Colorado, in Century Magazine, Nov., 1902.

regard from anything ever seen, and being on so stupendous a scale it overpowers, impresses, dominates to the full capacity of the human mind.

Another striking feature is the bizarre and unusual sculpturing and fashioning that the walls and rocks of the canyon have assumed. We think of the Garden of the Gods, Monument Park, the Bad Lands, and the wonderful Land of the Standing Rocks, as marvels of Nature's unique sculpturing, yet they are insignificant when compared with the towers, temples, minarets, domes, walls, buttresses, gargoyles, and other fantastic and strange creations of the Canyon. As an unknown writer has graphically said:

Hundreds of these mighty structures, miles in length and thousands of feet in height, rear their majestic forms out of the abyss, displaying their richly molded plinths and friezes, thrusting out their gables, wing walls, buttresses, and pilasters, and recessed with alcoves and panels.

Nowhere in the world is such wild, grand, marvelous, unusual architecture as here, and on such a sublime scale as to dwarf into insignificance man's most ambitious attempts, as St. Peter's, Cologne, Milan, St. Paul's, St. Sophia, the Kremlin, and the like. Nor should one think that there is no harmony in this architecture. Each stratum of rock has its own characteristic forms of erosion, and these adapt themselves remarkably as architectural details of marvelous quality to the vast structures which corrosion and erosion have formed.

The colors, too, are so different from what one has ever before experienced. Here are no soft, tender, gentle, pastoral landscapes, of refined greens and alluring tones of brown and yellow. No, indeed ! Flaming reds, chocolates,

Copyright by Fred Harvey

HERMIT CAMP

THIRTY-FIVE HUNDRED FEET BELOW THE RIM

Copyright by Fred Harvey

JACOB'S LADDER

ON BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL

GRAND CANYON OF ARIZONA 5

carmines, crimsons, resplendent yellows, oranges, saffrons; dazzling blues, greens, and creams; glaring patches and streaks of white; and thunderous splotches of black, make up this scene. Here Nature was in her most riotous mood, and spilled colors broadcast from her paint pots with lavish hands. Bizarre, grotesque, startling, at first sight, study and knowledge are required to understand and enjoy them. The blaze and glory of them are absolutely startling. Ten thousand rainbows of solid rock are broken up and tossed higgledy-piggledy into this chasm. Walls are made of the same materials, a rioting chaos of color — this is what it seems at first sight. The eye cannot focalize anything; the vastness confuses; the colors dazzle; the varied forms of the rocky masses bewilder.

Were this effect to persist, to continue indefinitely, the Grand Canyon would not please; it would repel by its first impressions. But in spite of this striking forcefulness, this bizarre uniqueness, this grotesque personality, there is something that attracts, that demands further investigation, that forbids the eyes to turn away. Then, slowly at first, soon more rapidly, the forms of the walls and domes, the towers and colonnades, assume distinct reality, individual personality. The colors resolve themselves into harmonious relationship, the chaos disappears and a very definite, organized cosmos takes its place. An hour, two hours, three, four, pass, and the visitor is still gazing, now drinking in eagerly an ever-varying panorama of form and color. The march of the sun makes constant change; the clouds float up from the everywhere into the here; atmospheric and electric effects are produced that tone down, soften, change, transform the scenes below, and every change is more wonderful and fascinating than the one that preceded it.

Nothing that I know of in the thousands of the pages that have been written on the Grand Canyon so fully brings out these facts as the following written by Major Clarence E. Button, the poet-scientist of the West. He says:

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado is a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery, and in our conceptions of the grandeur, beauty, and power of Nature, as with all great innovations, it is not to be comprehended in a day or a week, nor even in a month. It must be dwelt upon and studied, and the study must comprise the slow acquisition of the meaning and spirit of that marvelous scenery which characterizes the Plateau Country, and of which the great chasm is the superlative manifestation. The study and slow mastery of the influences of that class of scenery and its full appreciation is a special culture, requiring time, patience, and long familiarity for its consummation.

The lover of Nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever might be bold and striking would at first seem only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry and bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued, yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken especial delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent.

But time would bring a gradual change. Some day he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had added enormity to coarseness have become replete with strength and even majesty; that colors which had been

GRAND CANYON OF ARIZONA 7

esteemed unrefined, immodest, and glaring are as expressive, tender, changeful, and capacious of effects as any others. Great innovations, whether in art or literature, in science or in Nature, seldom take the world by storm. They must be understood before they can be estimated, and must be cultivated before they can be understood.*

Major J. W. Powell has this to say of the Grand Canyon, which presents another feature of its diverse attractiveness :

But form and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the Grand Canyon. It is the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the storm gods play upon the rocks, and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite blue of heaven is unveiled. With the melody of the great tide rising and falling, swelling and vanishing forever, other melodies are heard in the gorges of the lateral canyons, while the waters plunge in the rapids among the rocks or leap in great cataracts. Thus the Grand Canyon is a land of song. Mountains of music swell in the rivers, hills of music billow in the creeks, and meadows of music murmur in the rills that ripple over the rocks. Altogether it is a symphony of multitudinous melodies. All this is the music of waters. The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp upon which the clouds of heaven play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.f

There is no difficulty in reaching the Grand Canyon adays. The Santa Fe main line crosses Arizona, and at Williams one changes to the branch, which, in sixty-three miles, deposits you at El Tovar, the fine Fred Harvey hotel on the "rim." At the Grand Canyon one never speaks of the "edge;" it is always the "rim," and the south rim is

* Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1882.

t The Scientific Explorer, in the Grand Canyon of Arizona, Santa Fe Passenger Dept., 1906, the first portion to be made accessible by rail. But do not imagine you can see the Grand Canyon by rail. No! Nature cannot be treated that way, as yet, in her more magnificent and stupendous retreats. Of course, you can get one taste, one touch, one glimpse, one feel, and to some people that is enough. But if you really want to see it and know something about it, you must at least ride on its rim for a few miles, in each direction from El Tovar, and then descend one of the well-constructed trails down to the river; and, better still, steal the time to go down one trail, ride in the Canyon's heart to another, camping out by the side of the rapids of the ever-roaring river, or on the level stretches of one of the plateaus, then cross the river to the other side, ascend to the great Kaibab Plateau and ride through its superb pine forest to Point Sublime, the finest point in the whole Canyon system on the north, rim, ere you return. It is not a hard trip to one used to horseback riding and camping out, but of course the "de luxe" traveler had better remain in the "flowery beds of ease" provided by Fred Harvey in connection with El Tovar.

The Grand Canyon is not a mere object of scenery; it is a vast drainage system, covering thousands of square miles of territory, and embracing within its natural area large parts of the states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, California, and even New Mexico. Few, even of the most intelligent of its casual visitors, ever get it through their heads that if all its tributary canyons were placed in a straight line they would come within less than 5,000 miles of encircling the globe. For there are nearly 3,000 miles of canyon in the upper reaches of the Colorado, and its great tributaries, or forks, the Grand and the

ffi

GRAND CANYON OF ARIZONA 9

Green, ere the two hundred and seventeen-mile stretch, called in distinctiveness The Grand Canyon, is reached. And into almost every mile of this 3,000 miles, on each side, other canyons are lined, seamed, or troughed, in endless variety and never-ceasing sublimity. Canyon of Desolation, Lodore, Split Mountain, Flaming Gorge, Glen, Marble, are the names of a few of the principal ones, before reaching the entering canyon of the Little Colorado, which denotes the commencement of the Grand Canyon. This is some fifty or sixty miles east of El Tovar, and makes a great wagon and horseback ride for the adventurous who do not call the "pleasures" of camping out a "hardship."

While others had seen portions of the Grand Canyon and its tributaries, it was left for that "one-armed hero of Gettysburg," Major John Wesley Powell, first to fully describe its wonders. In 1869, 1870, and 1871 he and a band of large-souled adventurers set forth to explore its hidden mysteries and ride its waters from Green River, Wyoming, down to the Gulf; or, at least, to the Colorado Desert. The records of this trip were first given to the world in Scribner's Magazine, and later in government reports and books, and Dellenbaugh's Romance of the Colorado River. The story is thrilling in the extreme, and should form the theme of a lesson in American history, geography, geology, exploration, and heroism for every child in our schools — North, South, East, and West.

In my own two books, In and Around the Grand Canyon, and The Grand Canyon of Arizona, I have done my best to make its wonders, allurements, and rare marvels known. Everybody that has ever seen it knows it cannot be described, and then spends page after page in demonstrating that it cannot. The pen of a Ruskin, Carlyle, Dante, Goethe, Milton, or Shakspere would here fail, and the canvas of a Rembrandt, a Velasquez, a Turner, merely convey a faint impression of its sublimity and majesty in architecture and color. Hence there is but one thing left for the sensible American to do — that is to visit it. And when you do, be sure to plan for plenty of time. Don't be in a hurry. It took God and his army of natural forces hundreds of thousands of years to make it. Surely you can spend a few days to look at it — wandering on its rim, peering into its depths, riding into them — and thus begin to comprehend some of the vast workings of the Almighty Mind.

Chapter II Old Tags And The Flagellantes

A3.E you traveling to the Pacific Coast from the Middle West, North, or East ? Why not go leisurely and see all you can on the way? There are a score, or more, of places that will wonderfully pay you, and none more so than Taos (not Tay-os, Teh-os, Tay-oos, or Teh-us, but, as if it rhymed with house, say Towse, in one syllable), redolent of memories of Indians, of the great Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, of the uprising of Mexicans and Indians after the country was annexed by the United States, when Governor Bent was murdered, of Kit Carson and hosts of other interesting events and personalities.

It is an old Indian pueblo in New Mexico, the northernmost of all the "pueblos," or villages, of the Indians of the Rio Grande, its several-storied, high-terraced houses familiar to many travelers. Yet most Indian villages are " close corporations," conducted with a secrecy and resentment of intrusion that Wall Street has never surpassed.

But it is not of the Indians and their religious and social life, however mysterious and fascinating, that this chapter is to deal. Three miles from the Indian village is the laterfounded Spanish or Mexican town, of San Fernando de Taos. This was the home of Governor Bent, the first United States governor of New Mexico. Here lived Christopher Carson, the redoubtable Kit, guide and scout for the pathfinder Fremont, and fully as great a man in his way as was the more refined and cultured Fremont in his. Here stood formerly one of the historic churches of New Mexico, now gone, however, in the rage for a modernism that has no appreciation for the picturesqueness of the old. Here, too, is located today a modern school of American painters — Phillips, Sharp, and the rest — seeking to catch and put on canvas before it is too late the wonderful life of the real, untouched, superstitious, natural Indian in his primitive and gloriously picturesque simplicity.

And, more fascinating than all, it is the home, the natural centre, of that strange band of religionists known as " The Penitent Brothers." Even so learned and well-informed an authority as the Encyclopedia Britannica, in the last edition but one, as good as asserted that the Penitentes, or Flagellantes, were practically extinct; that the last procession of Flagellantes marched in 1820 in Lisbon.

And I have had several interesting experiences as the result of my contradiction of this high authority, when, lecturing in the East, I asserted that I had been present at Penitente processions, flagellations, and crucifixions in the boundaries of the United States within the past twenty-five years.

It was Charles F. Lummis, in his The Land of Poco Tiempo, who first wrote and illustrated these modern and American Penitentes. At the peril of his life, or at least at the point of a revolver, he secured photographs that materially enhanced the value of his descriptions, and I myself have made photographs of the devotees, with half a dozen shotguns leveled in my direction, held in the hands of angry Mexicans, who were only prevented from firing, I imagine,

TAGS PUEBLO, NEW MEXICO

OLD SPANISH FORT NEAR TAOS

Courtesy of Denver &• Rio Grande R. R.

CHURCH PROCESSION AT TAGS

Copyright by E. E. Wentu'orth Layton

PENITENTE " MORADA " (CHURCH) WITH CROSSES

OLD TAOS AND THE FLAGELLANTES 13

by the ominous glint in the eyes of a fearless deputy sheriff who was my guide (and comfort as well) on the occasion.

The Penitentes of our American Southwest — as commonly they are called — are the natural or illegitimate descendants of the Third Order of St. Francis. This order was founded to give to laymen the religious advantages of the saint's rule, when circumstances rendered it impossible or inadvisable for them to accept the rigid monastic life. After the wave of self-flagellation swept over Europe as the result of the preaching and example of Cardinal Peter Damian, and St. Anthony of Padua, many fraternities introduced the practice privately among their membership. Then, in 1260, owing to the incitations of Ramer, a monk of Perugia, great numbers of the inhabitants of this city, noble and ignoble, old and young, traversed the streets, carrying in their hands leathern thongs, with which "they drew forth blood from their tortured bodies amid sighs and tears, singing at the same time penitential psalms, and entreating the compassion of the Deity."

Then the custom spread by the example and teaching of peripatetic bands of devotees. At first they seemed to do considerable good in checking the open vice and wickedness of the people, but, in time, their exhibitions awakened the disgust of the better class of the people. Finally their flagellations grew so obnoxious to the moral sense of the church and the outside world that, in 1439, the occupant of the papal chair, Pope Clement vi, counselled and finally commanded that the order be suppressed.

Under the papacy of Gregory xi the Holy Inquisition hunted out those who still continued the practice, and the sect was believed to have disappeared entirely. Yet in 1414 it was revived openly by Conrad Schmidt, and though he and his principal followers were arrested and executed, the spirit of the order, if not its practices, still prevailed. Again, in the sixteenth century, it broke out in the south of France, and Henry in established a whipping brotherhood in Paris, and himself took an important part in the processions. These fraternities were suppressed by Henry iv, but nobody supposes for a moment that the practice was not continued, privately in the main, both in the south of France and in Italy and Spain. Yet, as far as is known, the last public procession was that already referred to as having taken place at Lisbon in 1820.

How the movement reached the Spanish settlements of Nueva Mexico, and took possession of the hearts and lives of the dwellers of the Southwest, would prove an interesting and fascinating theme for historical research. Conjecture alone, now, must fill up the gap, with the mere supposition that some devout and zealous colonists, coming from the old world of Spain, or the new world of Mexico, into the northern land of New Mexico and Arizona, possessed by Coronado, Ofiate, and the later conquerors, brought the ritual of the brotherhood with them, with all its repulsive ceremonies of whippings, cross-bearing, and crucifixion.

Certain it is, that when the United States forces, under General Stephen W. Kearny, took possession of this land, it was not long before whispers began to be heard of the strange doings of these bands of superstitious fanatics. When the facts were known and brought to the attention of the Archbishop at Santa Fe, he instructed the priests of his district to suppress the order, acting under the sanction of the early papal bull. But, inexplicable though it may

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OLD T/1OS AND THE FLAGELLANTES 15

seem, the cruel self-scourgings and the often fatal crucifixions of the brotherhood had taken such strong hold upon their religious instinct, native superstition, or fanaticism, that when the local priests called upon them, by authority of the head of the church, to desist from their practices, they positively refused. Steadily they continued their whippings and scourgings, their penances and crucifixions, in spite of all persuasions, commands, and final interdictions. Even when the Archbishop threatened to cast them out of the church they stolidly replied : " We do not care, we are Penitentes," as if that settled the question. To be a Penitente was far more satisfactory than to be a good Catholic. In that attitude they stand today. There is no longer open and definite enmity between themselves and the priests, but there is a tacit understanding that nothing is to be said on the subject on either side. Hence at Taos, and a score or two other Mexican settlements in the region I have mentioned, the Penitentes still hold full sway. The chief tenet of the Brotherhood seems to be a very literal interpretation of the words of the apostle:

But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings ; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy. I Pet. 4: 13.

It was at Raton, about twenty-nine years ago, that I had my first experience with this wonderful fanaticism known as " Penitentes." I had been wandering over the surrounding country with an interesting character such as one occasionally meets on the frontier — who knows everybody and whom everybody knows, and who goes where many men dare not go, and does naturally some things that most men never think of doing. So when he came to me one morning with the information that it was Easter time, and the Penitente Brothers would be engaged in their strange ceremonials, it did not take us long to secure horses and ride down the canyon three or four miles south of town, and we were soon perched upon a hillside where we could look down upon the little Mexican jacal from which the penetrating tones of a flute or flageolet wailed forth most dolorous notes. Following the flute we heard the singing of one or two hymns in rude, uncultivated voices of men.