The day is blue above, without a cloud. Will you walk with me through our village, gentle reader? We will begin at the handsome open square. Now as we advance my heart leaps at the sight of my birthplace. What a pretty location it is! Here is "the cot of my father:" "In youth it sheltered me." It is the "loved spot which my infancy knew." "How dear to my heart" is this "scene of my childhood." Happy childhood thus early blessed with blessings hereditary to all after hours! There is no place so suggestive and interesting in our adult years as that in which we began life. It is one of those exquisite situations which paint their own picture insensibly in the memory while you look on them, natural, daguerreotypes, as it were. Considered only as a house, it left some things to be desired but it is never to be considered only as a house. Why is it that we thus love the place of our birth? Why have all men done the same? The son of the mist, in Scott, in his dying hour, begged that he might be turned so that his eyes could rest once more upon his native hills and close with their latest vision fixed there. Why did the hero of Virgil, in his death hour, manifest his love for the place of his birth which is so beautifully narrated by that immortal bard? It is an instinct, which gives to it a place in the human heart, and such an expression in human thought. Like poetry it is born with us, not made. There probably is no stronger feeling in us than that of attachment to our first home. A man transplanted to another field may have succeeded well. His condition may have been vastly improved and yet he may have drooped without apparent cause, in his temporary home, pining for those days which were passed in the Eden of his life. I could not get enough of the place. Must I leave thee, dear sacred spot, how can I leave thee? My heart was full and the tears started to my eyes as I gazed around upon every object. The words of my earliest progenitor, on leaving our ancestral garden, as quoted by Milton, came to me, "Must I leave thee, paradise?"

The Vine Must Have the Wall

Luther could appear in battle scenes for social and religious reform with undaunted spirit. He could oppose the enemies of his faith without a trembling nerve. He could resist those, bent on his destruction, with the courage and calmness of a Christian hero, but when upon a journey to meet the Counts of Mansfield, he came in sight of his own native Eisleben, the great man was overcome with emotion and he bowed his head and wept.

"The Man Returned who Left these Haunts a Boy"

Congress voted unanimously in 1824 to invite Lafayette to visit this country. He was received everywhere with great demonstrations of popular enthusiasm and his progress through the country resembled a continuous triumphal procession. He visited, in succession, each of the twenty-four states, and all the principal cities which vied to do him honor, but relatively he was unmoved. A splendid coach was at his service. He passed beneath an elaborate arch blazoned with words of welcome, but Lafayette relatively was unmoved. Sitting quietly with no expectation excited, before a screen in a public assembly, the curtain lifted and there stood his birthplace, in speaking beauty and suggestiveness and all the deeps of his heroic nature were broken up and he sobbed audibly like a child. The strong old home still held him to its heart.

How is such a birthplace marked? Chiefly by a gush of rich emotion in the heart of him who claims it as his own. Nature attends to that. A boy has warm affections. A birthplace may have no Forefathers' Rock. Peregrine White was not born there. No Charter Oak or Washington Elm, with living dignity may identify the place. There may be no cellar which concealed the royal judges, nor any door pierced by Indian bullets, nor drums which awaked the sleepers at Lexington and Concord, yet it is distinctively sacred to one's childhood days. It has the deep endearment of a darling home.

"Where is my home? I want to go before dark," said a spirited little fellow of three years. The action of his inner nature was like the turning of the needle to the pole. Thus an unfortunate child will put up a fight for his birthright and he will not yield without returning to the struggle. He wants his heritage.

"I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER, THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN"

The Gate to Life

Somehow my heart keeps flying back to my birthplace as Antony's kept flying back to Egypt. If a man has no heart, if he is altogether lacking in veneration the attention given to his birthplace by other persons would impress it upon his notice. "Where were you born?" asks the life insurance agent. What has that to do with it? How does that affect the situation? Why does he not limit himself to vital statistics, like your age, habits, general health? Through more than three thousand closely printed pages, Who's Who in America, carefully mentions in each biography the birthplace of the subject. There must be some reason for making this one of the chief facts when the space is needed to tell of positions held, wealth and fame acquired.

At this point a daily paper comes to my desk containing an interesting recital touching America the Beautiful. We are informed that Miss Bates "has a most sympathetic personality" and "is a native of Falmouth on Cape Cod." Are the song and person better or different from that which they would have been if instead of Falmouth the birthplace had been Yarmouth or Barnstable or Wellfleet Several towns in France are disputing the honor of being the birthplace of General Foch. The papers and magazines speak of his genius, of his responsible position, the most distinguished in military history, of his never-resting blow-on-blow method of conquering, but they cut the thread of an interesting narrative short, to consider the question of his birthplace as if that, after all, was a principal question. It seems that "the Lord shall count when he writeth up the people that this man was born there." Agents and learned men, and it appears even the deity, attach significance to the place of one's birth. So then will I.

But there are spots on the sun. There's a fly in the ointment. I am suffering from an incurable complaint. I was born too soon. I cannot now put the clock back. Besides we are entering on a new era. There is to be an overturning. Society and the ways of government and the methods of business are to be changed and I want to be a witness and would like to be a factor. The temper of each generation is a surprise. This new period is to be different in its ideals, employments, and conditions and I would like to be entirely of it.

Footprints on the Sands of Time

I took up the other day a book of fiction that is equally the delight of the child and of the man and opened it where a picture represented the surprise of Robinson Crusoe at discovering the print of a man's foot on the seashore. On revisiting the earth it touches one's emotion after being orphaned, islanded, for a generation from one's father to come upon his footprints in his old haunts. Without the experience of it, on visiting an early home, no one would imagine, what a shadowy train of memory, involving all the past, would come crowding before his eyes, filling his heart with a pleasant pain, and a sweet bitterness. Only once stand in the old environment and feel the atmosphere of early living conditions and a vivid panorama of faces that it was thought had vanished and scenes that it was supposed had faded will unroll "when fond recollection presents them to view." I hardly realized how sweet those memories were to me until my visit. I began to see that one must get away from home, be exiled for a while, to gain a pensive mood. Homesickness is in reality a spiritual instinct, a needed, useful force. Howard Payne felt its power when living in a garret in Paris, on the edge of starvation, he longed for his "lowly thatched cottage again," as David longed for a drink of the water of the well of his birthplace, which is by the gate of Bethlehem. This locality was the playground of my childhood. It is connected with the sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past. I stand in a fixed position. This is the location of my earliest recollection. Here memory began. This was a new birth. Commencing in the community and continuing all along thereafter, by inquiry, I have sought widely to ascertain at what point in the lives of other persons, recollection made a start. From his biography by his daughter I learn that my whilom instructor, Professor Austin Phelps, remembered Napoleon's death, an event that occurred when he was two. Franklin says he was a reader from his infancy. Samuel Johnson, before he was two, had begun to take a permanent hold upon events. One of my associates recalls a theatric incident that occurred when he was two. My recollection made no registration until after I was three and this was a scene here in my father's new unfinished church, and among its primitive temporary seats which were without backs. Thus I stand where my outlook on the world began. At that point I see myself for the first time in my career. Other events follow in close order but it has been a great pleasure that my angel mother and her beloved church are ineffaceably pictured on the front page of my book of remembrance.

Things Sweet to Remember

To discover that modest House of Prayer in which my father began his ministry was like a miracle, like finding someone who had risen from the dead. My eye was not satisfied with seeing it twice or thrice. I contemplated it as I would the "House not made with hands," I could have kneeled and kissed the threshold of this historic but very lowly temple. It seemed a construction transported, ready-built into this world and located in one of its most delightful spots. It seemed different, like a piece of meteoric stone which for a fact appears here but whose home has been in the skies, and like the stony pillow on Judea's plain it became to my vision a House of God. This is a holy land to me. It savors of the assemblies of the saints. If I were looking for beauty I would return to that divine abode. A stranger not knowing the antecedents of the little sanctuary would discern no form nor comeliness in it. It was an hour when one could think of but two things, one was home, and one was heaven. These earthly objects have a comeliness, a simple dignity, and nattiness which are beyond the reach of art. How it elevates the spirit to stand, thrilled by a beautiful romance and find that it is not romance at all but unspeakably sacred reality.

THE LITTLE SANCTUARY

Oh the brave, the noble souls who have laid foundations. They were elect people set apart to a sacred service which has no equal in this world's history. I am not "the wretch