Nearer the bound of life,

Where we lay our burdens down,
Nearer leaving the cross

Nearer gaining the crown.

THE TUNE.

The old revival tune of "Dunbar," with its chorus, "There'll be no more sorrow there," has been sung to the hymn, but the tone-lyric of Philip Phillips, "Nearer Home," has made the words its own, and the public are more familiar with it than with any other. It was this air that a young man in a drinking house in Macao, near Hong-Kong, began humming thoughtlessly while his companion was shuffling the cards for a new game. Both were Americans, the man with the cards more than twenty years the elder. Noticing the tune, he threw down the pack. Every word of the hymn had come back to him with the echo of the music.

"Harry, where did you learn that hymn ?" "What hymn ?"

"Why the one you have been singing.'

The young man said he did not know what he had been singing. But when the older one repeated some of the lines, he said they were learned in the Sunday-school.

"Come, Harry," said the older one, "here's what I've won from you. As for me, as God sees me, I have played my last game, and drank my last bottle. I have misled you, Harry, and I am sorry for it. Give me your hand, my boy, and say that,

for old America's sake, if for no other, you will quit this infernal business.”

Col. Russel H. Conwell, of Boston, (now Rev. Dr. Conwell of Philadelphia) who was then visiting China, and was an eye-witness of the scene, says that the reformation was a permanent one for both.

"I WILL SING YOU A SONG OF THAT BEAUTIFUL

LAND."

One day, in the year 1865, Mrs. Ellen M. H. Gates received a letter from Philip Phillips noting the passage in the Pilgrim's Progress which describes the joyful music of heaven when Christian and Hopeful enter on its shining shore beyond the river of death, and asking her to write a hymn in the spirit of the extract, as one of the numbers in his Singing Pilgrim. Mrs. Gates complied-and the sequel of the hymn she wrote is part of the modern song-history of the church. Mr. Phillips has related how, when he received it, he sat down with his little boy on his knee, read again the passage in Bunyan, then the poem again, and, turning to his organ, pencil in hand, pricked the notes of the melody. "The 'Home of the Soul,'" he says,

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seems to have had God's blessing from the beginning, and has been a comfort to many a bereaved soul. Like many loved hymns, it has had a peculiar history, for its simple melody has Яowed from the lips of High Churchmen, and has

sought to make itself heard above the din of Salvation Army cymbals and drums. It has been sung in prisons and in jailyards, while the poor convict was waiting to be launched into eternity, and on hundreds of funeral occasions. One man writes me that he has led the singing of it at one hundred and twenty funerals. It was sung at my dear boy's funeral, who sat on my knee when I wrote it. It is my prayer that God may continue its solace and comfort. I have books containing the song now printed in seven different languages."

A writer in the Golden Rule (now the Christian Endeavor World) calls attention to an incident on a night railroad train narrated in the late Benjamin F. Taylor's World on Wheels, in which "this hymn appears as a sort of Traveller's Psalm." Among the motley collection of passengers, some talkative, some sleepy, some homesick and cross, all tired, sat two plain women who, "would make capital country aunts....If they were mothers at all they were good ones." Suddenly in a dull silence, near twelve o'clock, a voice, sweet and flexible, struck up a tune. The singer was one of those women. "She sang on, one after another the good Methodist and Baptist melodies of long ago," and the growing interest of the passengers became chained attention when she began—

"I will sing you a song of that beautiful land,
The far-away home of the soul,

Where no storms can beat on the glittering strand,
While the years of eternity roll.

O, that home of the soul, in my visions and dreams,
Its bright jasper walls I can see;

Till I fancy but thinly the veil intervenes
Between the fair city and me."

"The car was a wakeful hush long before she had ended; it was as if a beautiful spirit were floating through the air. None that heard will ever forget. Philip Phillips can never bring that 'home of the soul' any nearer to anybody. And never, I think, was quite so sweet a voice lifted in a storm of a November night on the rolling plains of Iowa."

In an autograph copy of her hymn, sent to the editor, Mrs. Gates changes "harps" to "palms." Is it an improvement? "Palms" is a word of two meanings.

O how sweet it will be in that beautiful land,

So free from all sorrow and pain,

With songs on our lips and with harps in our hands
To meet one another again.

"THERE'S A LAND THAT IS FAIRER THAN DAY"

This belongs rather with "Christian Ballads' than with genuine hymns, but the song has had and still has an uplifting mission among the lowly whom literary perfection and musical nicety could not touch-and the first two lines, at least, are good hymn-writing. Few of the best sacred lyrics have been sung with purer sentiment and more affectionate fervor than "The Sweet By-and-By." Το any company keyed to sympathy by time, place,

and condition, the feeling of the song brings unshed

tears.

As nearly as can be ascertained it was in the year 1867 that a man about forty-eight years old, named Webster, entered the office of Dr. Bennett in Elkhorn, Wis., wearing a melancholy look, and was rallied good-naturedly by the doctor for being so blue-Webster and Bennett were friends, and the doctor was familiar with the other's frequent fits of gloom.

The two men had been working in a sort of partnership, Webster being a musician and Bennett a ready verse-writer, and together they had created and published a number of sheet-music songs. When Webster was in a fit of melancholy, it was the doctor's habit to give him a "dose" of new verses and cure him by putting him to work. Today the treatment turned out to be historic.

"What's the matter now," was the doctor's greeting when his "patient" came with the tell-tale face. "O, nothing," said Webster. "It'll be all right by and by."

"Why not make a song of the sweet by and by ?" rejoined the doctor, cheerfully.

"I don't know," said Webster, after thinking a second or two. "If you'll make the words, I'll write the music."

The doctor went to his desk, and in a short time produced three stanzas and a chorus to which his friend soon set the notes of a lilting air, brightening up with enthusiasm as he wrote. Seizing his