It happened that a service was almost due, and the sexton and an old companion were there; so the visitors were able to enter the sanctuary. They remained in silence a few minutes, when one of the party, pointing to the little organ, asked Dame Clara to play it and sing. She shook her head; the request was repeated; the impulse came and the singer sat at the instrument, and sang the opening lines of Liddle’s setting of “Abide With Me.” In a few minutes she was conscious that the old sexton was chiming in with notes which harmonized; but, as the great voice rang through the little church, he stopped to listen, for nothing like it had ever been heard there. When the last notes died away, he said, “But who is this lady who has sung to us?” When he was told he held up his hands, and with tears falling, exclaimed, “The great Madame Clara Butt has come to our little church and sung to us!” Then pointing upward, he said reverently: “Ah! They heard that up there!” This tribute, coming from the sexton who had himself once sung in Welsh choirs, was all the more gratifying because it was simple and spontaneous. Here is an interesting sidelight upon The Author of “Beulah Land” Edgar Page Stites, the author of “Beulah Land” and many other popular hymns, was a local deacon of the Methodist Episcopal Church and served as a supply preacher in Dakota. At the outbreak of the Civil War he lived in Richmond, Virginia. After enlisting he was stationed in Philadelphia and had charge of feeding the troops which passed through that city. At the time of his death in Cape May he was the oldest insurance agent in New Jersey. During his retirement he once wrote to a friend: “I am whittling away on my eighty-second year. Have written a great many songs the last fifty years signed ‘Edgar Page,’ which is the front of my name. I was enabled by great spiritual help to write ‘Beulah Land’ in 1876, at Philadelphia. I was wonderfully converted sixty-five years ago this month [November, 1852] and am still on board the old ship Zion.” “Uncle Joe” Cannon, ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, once met Mr. Stites in Cape May and told him he would rather have written “Beulah Land” than to have been President of the United States. Chaplain McCabe was the first to introduce this now famous hymn to the public, singing it at a ministers’ meeting in Philadelphia. Since then it has been sung around the world and during the World War it was a general favorite of the soldiers overseas. And another sidelight upon the writer of A Hymn of Consecration