While convalescing in the hospital he went one day to the piano and began playing very softly. One of the nurses then came up to him and said a Captain Webster of the Gordon Highlanders who knew his father, Sir Harry, wanted to see him. What followed had best be stated in his own words, quoted in A Minstrel in France[26] by Harry Lauder:
“This man had gone through ten operations in less than a week. I thought perhaps my playing had disturbed him, but when I went to his bedside, he grasped my hand, pressed it with what little strength he had left, and thanked me. He asked me if I could play a hymn. He said he would like to hear ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ So I went back to the piano and played it as softly and as gently as I could. It was his last request. He died an hour later. I was very glad I was able to soothe his last moments a little. I am very glad that I learned the hymn at Sunday School as a boy.”
Dr. R. J. Campbell tells a touching story about a mother and her only child whose request was
“Sing, Muzzer, Sing”
This young English mother made a living for herself and child by singing in the concert halls of London, and so at night she was compelled to leave him while meeting her engagements. One night she had a foreboding of evil but she had to keep her appointment. The rapture of the crowds and the encores were nothing to her as on this night she hurried back to the lad. She took him up in her arms and held him as if he could never slip away. But he was dying, and his broken words were, “Sing, muzzer, sing.” What an ordeal! But she responded. Her clear sweet voice broke upon the hush of that tenement room in the words of the matchless hymn of the children:
“I think when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here among men;
How He called little children like lambs to His fold,
I should like to have been with Him then.”
Another hymn made a moving impression upon a large congregation when