even more simple--owes its only variety to the change of one word. The
third and fourth lines,--

My father calls me, I must go
To meet Him in the Promised Land,

--take their cue from the first, which may sing,--

I have a Saviour----
I have a mother----
I have a brother----

--and so on ad libitum. But the little ones love every sound and
syllable of the lisping song, for it is plain and pleasing, and when a
pinafore school grows restless nothing will sooner charm them into quiet
than to chime its innocent unison.

Both words and tune are nameless and storyless.

"I THINK WHEN I READ THAT SWEET STORY"

While riding in a stage-coach, after a visit to a mission school for
poor children, this hymn came to the mind of Mrs. Jemima Thompson Luke,
of Islington, England. It speaks its own purpose plainly enough, to
awaken religious feeling in young hearts, and guide and sanctify the
natural childlike interest in the sweetest incident of the Saviour's
life.

I think when I read that sweet story of old
When Jesus was here among men,
How He called little children as lambs to His fold,
I should like to have been with them then.

I wish that His hands had been laid on my head,
And I had been placed on His knee,
And that I might have seen His kind look when He said,
"Let the little ones come unto me."

This is not poetry, but it phrases a wish in a child's own way, to be
melodized and fixed in a child's reverent and sensitive memory.

Mrs. Luke was born at Colebrook Terrace, near London, Aug. 19, 1813. She
was an accomplished and benevolent lady who did much for the education
and welfare of the poor. Her hymn--of five stanzas--was first sung in a
village school at Poundford Park, and was not published until 1841.

_THE TUNE._

It is interesting, not to say curious, testimony to the vital quality of
this meek production that so many composers have set it to music, or
that successive hymn-book editors have kept it, and printed it to so
many different harmonies. All the chorals that carry it have
substantially the same movement--for the spondaic accent of the long
lines is compulsory--but their offerings sing "to one clear harp in
divers tones."

The appearance of the words in one hymnal with Sir William Davenant's
air (full scored) to Moore's love-song, "Believe me, if all those
endearing young charms," now known as the tune of "Fair Harvard," is
rather st