tening up with enthusiasm as he wrote. Seizing his violin, which
he had with him, he played the melody, and in a few minutes more he had
filled in the counterpoint and made a complete hymn-tune. By that time
two other friends, who could sing, had come in and the quartette tested
the music on the spot. Here different accounts divide widely as to the
immediate sequel of the new-born song.

A Western paper in telling its story a year or two ago, stated that
Webster took the "Sweet By and By" (in sheet-music form), with a batch
of other pieces, to Chicago, and that it was the only song of the lot
that Root and Cady would not buy; and finally, after he had tried in
vain to sell it, Lyon and Healy took it "out of pity," and paid him
twenty dollars. They sold eight or ten copies (the story continued) and
stowed it away with dead goods, and it was not till apparently a long
time after, when a Sunday-school hymn-book reprinted it, and began to
sell rapidly on its account, that the "Sweet By and By" started on its
career round the world.

This seems circumstantial enough, and the author of the hymn in his own
story of it might have chosen to omit some early particulars, but,
untrustworthy as the chronology of mere memory is, he would hardly
record immediate popularity of a song that lay in obscurity for years.
Dr. Bennett's words are, "I think it was used in public shortly after
[its production], for within two weeks children on the street were
singing it."

The explanation may be partly the different method and order of the
statements, partly lapses of memory (after thirty years) and partly in
collateral facts. The Sunday-school hymn-book was evidently _The Signet
Ring_, which Bennett and Webster were at work upon and into which first
went the "Sweet By and By"--whatever efforts may have been made to
dispose of it elsewhere or whatever copyright arrangement could have
warranted Mr. Healy in purchasing a song already printed. The _Signet
Ring_ did not begin to profit by the song until the next year, after a
copy of it appeared in the publishers' circulars, and started a demand;
so that the _immediate_ popularity implied in Doctor Bennett's account
was limited to the children of Elkhorn village.

The piece had its run, but with no exceptional result as to its hold on
the public, until in 1873 Ira D. Sankey took it up as one of his working
hymns. Modified from its first form in the "_Signet Ring_" with
pianoforte accompaniment