in a city distant from home, her hidden talent was betrayed by
the friends to the pastor of their church, where a revival was in
progress, and persuasion that seemed to put a duty upon her finally
procured her consent to sing a solo.

The church was crowded. With a force and feeling that can easily be
guessed she sang "Where Is My Boy Tonight?" and finished the first
stanza. She began the second,--

Once he was pure as morning dew,
As he knelt at his mother's knee,
No face was so bright, no heart more true,
And none were so sweet as he;

--and as the congregation caught up the refrain,--

O where is my boy tonight?
O where is my boy tonight?
My heart overflows, for I love him he knows,
O where is my boy tonight?

--a young man who had been sitting in a back seat made his way up the
aisle and sobbed, "Mother, I'm here!" The embrace of that mother and her
long-lost boy turned the service into a general hallelujah. At the
inquiry meeting that night there were many souls at the Mercy Seat who
never knelt there before--and the young wanderer was one.

[Illustration: Philip Doddridge, D.D.]

Mr. Sankey, when in California with Mr. Moody, sang this hymn in one of
the meetings and told the story of a mother in the far east who had
commissioned him to search for her missing son. By a happy providence
the son was in the house--and the story and the song sent him home
repentant.

At another time Mr. Sankey sang the same hymn from the steps of a
snow-bound train, and a man between whose father and himself had been
trouble and a separation, was touched, and returned to be reconciled
after an absence of twenty years.

At one evening service in Stanberry, Mo., the singing of the hymn by the
leader of the choir led to the conversion of one boy who was present,
and whose parents were that night praying for him in an eastern state,
and inspired such earnest prayer in the hearts of two other runaway
boys' parents that the same answer followed.

There would not be room in a dozen pages to record all the similar
saving incidents connected with the singing of "Where Is My Wandering
Boy?" The rhetoric of love is strong in every note and syllable of the
solo, and the tender chorus of voices swells the song to heaven like an
antiphonal prayer.

Strange to say, Dr. Lowry set lightly by his hymns and tunes, and
deprecated much mention of them though he could not deny their success.
An ac