The members of [the Temperance] choir consisted almost entirely of the working classes, and often would the men engaged in the Iron Works turn in on their way to night duty, to practise, arrayed in their soiled aprons, with moleskin trousers and little jackets with a handkerchief peeking out of their pockets, which they used to wipe the sweat from their brow as they stood in front of the fiery furnace -

"As I listened to them," she [Megan Watts Hughes] writes, "singing from Beethoven's "Engedi" "Worlds unborn shall sing His glory" they seemed to me to be tranformed into Musical Gods, and I felt scores of times as if I could curtsey to them."