Down in a Southern hospital a soldier was dying; he was a Scotchman and an infidel. A missionary of the Christian Commission stood by his cot, but he would not listen to the Gospel; he covered his face with the bed-cover and turned away in pride and scorn. The missionary did not know what to do, but noticing that he was a Scotchman, and knowing, himself, the sweetness of the old psalms to the Scottish ear, he sat down a little way off and began to sing the twenty-third psalm in the old Rous version:— “The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want,
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green. He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.” He sang on quietly, tenderly. Before he was half through the psalm the patient was trembling from head to foot and sobbing aloud. He threw the covering down and said: “Why did you sing that psalm? My mother taught it to me by her knee, and it was her last message to me when she died.” The ice was broken; the heart was open to the truth; tenderly the seed was sown and the soul was saved.—Sel.