We look for the Magician who, with a wave of the hand, made all these to live and move before us. We know he must be there. We "cannot make him dead"; but he can make himself and us alive in the life of the past. A little door, with one shutter of Memory and one of Faith, opens before us, and he comes to dwell again in the world which he created in "The Sign of the Wren's Nest."

[ "THE POET OF THE FLAG" ]

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY

Away back in the years, Terra Rubra, the colonial home of John Ross Key, spread out broad acres under the sky of Maryland, in the northern part of Frederick County. Girt by noble trees, the old mansion, built of brick that came from England in the days when the New World yet remained in ignorance of the wealth of her natural and industrial resources, stood in the middle of the spacious lawn which afforded a beautiful playground for little Francis Scott Key and his young sister, who lived here the ideal home life of love and happiness. Among the flowers of the terraced garden they learned the first lessons of beauty and sweetness and the triumph of growth and blossoming. At a short distance was a dense line of forest, luring the young feet into tangled wildernesses of greenery and the colorful beauty of wild flowers in summer, and lifting great gray arms in solemn majesty against the dun skies of winter. Through it flowed the rippling silver of Pipe Creek on its sparkling way to the sea. At the foot of a grassy slope a spring offered draughts of the clear pure water which is said to be the only drink for one who would write epics or live an epic. Beyond a wide expanse of wind-blown grass the young eyes saw the variant gray and purple tints of the Catoctin Mountains, showing mystic changes in the floodtide of day or losing themselves in the crimson and gold sea of sunset.

In this stately, old, many-verandaed home, looking across nearly three thousand acres of fertile land as if with a proud sense of lordship, the wide-browed, poet-faced boy with the beautiful dreamy eyes and the line of genius between his delicately arched brows passed the golden years of his childhood.

It is said that President Washington once went to Terra Rubra to visit his old friend. General John Ross Key, of Revolutionary fame. It may be that the venerated hand of the "Father of His Country"—the hand that had so resolutely put away all selfish ambitions and had reached out only for good things to bestow upon his people and his nation—was laid in blessing upon the bright young head of little Francis Scott Key, helping to plant in the youthful heart the seed that afterward blossomed into the thought which he expressed many years later:

I have said that patriotism is the preserving virtue of Republics. Let this virtue wither and selfish ambition assume its place as the motive for action, and the Republic is lost.

Here, my countrymen, is the sole ground of danger.

Seven miles from Annapolis, where the Severn River flows into Round Bay, stands Belvoir, a spacious manor-house with sixteen-inch walls, in which are great windows reaching down to the polished oak floor. In this home of Francis Key, his grandfather, the young Francis Scott Key spent a part of the time of his tutelage, preparing for entrance into St. John's College, the stately buildings of which were erected by a certain early Key, who had come to our shore to help unlock the gates of liberty for the world.

The old college, with its historic campus, fits well into the atmosphere of Annapolis, standing proudly in her eighteenth-century dignity, watching the rest of the world scramble in a helter-skelter rush for modern trivialities. Its old walls are in pleasing harmony with the colonial mansions poised on little hillocks, from which they look down on you with benevolent condescension and invite you to climb the long flights of steps that lead to their very hearts, grand but hospitable, which you do in a glow of high-pitched ambition, as if you were scaling an arduous but fascinating intellectual height. Having reached the summit, you stop an instant on the landing, partly for breathing purposes, but more especially to exult a moment on the height of triumph.