The night before the arrival of the Second Expedition of humans from Earth, Martian consciousnesses are unsettled by an onslaught of human songs, poems, and nursery rhymes. A singer finds her performance interrupted after she sings lines from the Lord Byron poem “She Walks in Beauty,” alarming the other Martians, who flee to their homes while similar occurrences happen “all around the nervous towns of Mars” (19). Children run in the street, singing the morose final lines of “Old Mother Hubbard,” though they do not understand the language. Throughout the night, women awake, screaming, after their dreams assure them that “‘Something terrible will happen in the morning” (20). As morning breaks, a night watchman begins to sing.