The sweetest word in the language we speak is home. No matter in what clime or country, whether where sunbeams dance and play or frost fiend rules the air, there's no place like home. At the World's Fair in Chicago I visited the Eskimo village. To a woman who could speak English I said: "How do you like this country?"
"Beautiful, beautiful country. Oh, the flowers, the green grass, the lovely homes!" was her reply.
But when I ventured to ask: "Will you remain here after the fair and not return to your land of ice and snow," she shook her head and said: "No, I want to go home. I am so homesick."
"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." In Lexington, Kentucky, there is a modest looking house, nestled mid linden and locust trees. Visitors who pass in quest of historic spots about the far-famed city, seldom give even a glance at that humble abode. Yet when I am far away, whether in the wonderful west with its scenic grandeur, or in the east surrounded by mansions of millionaires, my heart goes back in memory's aeroplane to the old Blue Grass town, where six generations of my family sleep, the dearest spot on earth to me—"home, sweet home." When years ago I was nearing the end of a three months' lecture tour in California, a friend invited me to join him on a visit to Yosemite Valley, saying: "You will see the grandest scenery and biggest trees in the world." My reply was: "I thank you very much, but my engagements in the golden west close on the eighth and I will start east on the ninth; my old Kentucky home is grander to me than Yosemite Valley and my baby bigger than any tree in California."
Someone has said the nearest spot to heaven in this world is a happy home, where the parents are young and the children small. I don't know about that. It seems to me a little nearer heaven is the home where husband and wife have lived long together, where children honor parents and parents honor God; where the aged wife can look her husband in the face and give him the sentiment of the dame of John Anderson:
"John Anderson, my jo John,
When we were first acquent;
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonnie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,