THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR \VRITERS 445
Thompson went to the Normal Infant School, Gray s Inn Road, in 1841, to obtain some knowledge of teaching. Mary Moffat, afterwards the wife of David Livingstone, was a student there at the time. Among the marching-pieces which the teachers had to learn was a Greek air, the pathos of which took Miss Thompson s fancy. She searched Sunday-school books for words to which she might fit this music, but could find none. She fell ill in 1841 with erysipelas, and was sent home to Taunton. One day she went in the two-horse coach to Wellington, five miles away, to see how a little branch of the Society for Female Education in the East was prospering. It was a beautiful spring morning, and she was the only inside passenger. She took a letter from her pocket, and on the back of the envelope wrote in pencil the first two verses of this hymn. She wished to teach it to the village school near Poundsford Park, which was supported by her stepmother.
Mr. Thompson had charge of a little Sunday school on his estate, and allowed the children to choose the first hymn. One Sunday afternoon they began to sing his daughter s hymn. He asked his younger girls, Where did that come from? I never heard it before. They replied, Oh, Jemima wrote it. 1 On Monday he sent a copy of the hymn and tune to the Sunday School Teachers Magazine, where it appeared the following month. Mrs. Luke always considers The Child s Desire an inspiration, for she was never able to write another hymn of such merit. The third verse was added, at her father s wish, to make it a missionary hymn. It was published anonymously in the Leeds Hymn-book, 1853.
Mr. J. Morgan Richards says, in his reminiscences, that in 1889, when a bazaar was held on behalf of the British and Foreign Sailors Society, his wife found Mrs. Luke s address with great difficulty, and went to see her at Newport, Isle of Wight. She got permission to have her portrait and a facsimile of the hymn in her writing on sale at the bazaar. Mrs. Luke s father was one of the founders of the British and Foreign Sailors Society. Two little American girls, who had sung the hymn very sweetly at the morning service in the City Temple, also sang it at the bazaar ; and two small African boys who heard them learnt it, and sang it with great effect in a tour through England, undertaken to raise funds for a school in Natal.
Mrs. Luke died on February 2, 1906.
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