days of war is told, when the pelting storm was more pitiless than the iron hail of the artillery. What stories, too, can grandma tell of the stately offers she re- ceived in the old days of propriety, when every lad in the village took off his cap and shuffled out of her way with due respect as she went to church. Like Madame Blaize, she can affirm that "the king himself has followed her when she has walked before;" that the village doctor had to take his own medicines when her rejection of him brought on a nervous cough, and that when one of Washington's regiments was quartered in the town the colonel, with many bows, asked the honor of dancing a minuet with her. Burn brightly, winter fire, and weave romances of the past as your smoke curls up the chimney of the happy home! No novelist can write such stories as those which your bright light recalls of child- hood's days and those of early man or womanhood, and plighted love and marriage bells, and the advent of the infant stranger, and the voices that made such tender music in our hearts, and the partings to meet again and the partings to meet hereafter in a home where tears and partings are no more. " Home, Sweet Home ! " Unbidden the simple melody, more sung with heart and voice through the wide world than any hymn of praise or national anthem, comes into the mind and flows from the fingers to the page: "'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home ! A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there. Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere 1 Home, home, sweet, sweet home! There's no place like home ! There's no place like home ! *'An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain! O, give me my lowly thatched cottage again ! The birds singing gayly, that came at my call- Give me them ! — and the peace of mind, dearer than alli Home, home, sweet, sweet home ! There's no place like home! There's no place like home I " 334 THE H^EARTHSTONE ; OR, LIFE AT HOME, Such are the h'nes as John Howard Payne wrote them, and as they were punctuated by himself. A glance in retrospect at his own wan- dering and changeful life gives them a stronger force and deeper meaning. The beautiful frontispiece to this volume shows us Payne's own fireside, but for manj'' years of his eventful career he had no home. It is a sad comment on his world-famous song that scarce one of his biographers has recorded even the time and place of his birth correctly. All sorts of fables have been written about him and his poem. Some have said that he was starving in London when, on a bitter night beneath a street lamp, he wrote in anguish his plain- tive melody. But it was not so. He himself has left us the true story. The poem was written as an interlude in his " Clari, the Maid of Milan," an opera in three acts. In 1835, while at New Orleans, when questioned as to the music of the song, he told his friend, Mr. James Rees, of Philadelphia, that the air to which he had written ihe words was not wholly original with Henry R. Bishop, its composer, and director of the orchestra at Covent Garden Theatre, where " Clari " was first performed on Thursday, May 8, 1823. " I first heard the air," said Payne, " in Italy.

AI-modernized reading of the original text

days of war is told, when the pelting storm was more pitiless than the iron hail of the artillery. What stories, too, can grandma tell of the stately offers she received in the old days of propriety, when every lad in the village took off his cap and shuffled out of her way with due respect as she went to church. Like Madame Blaize, she can affirm that "the king himself has followed her when she has walked before;" that the village doctor had to take his own medicines when her rejection of him brought on a nervous cough, and that when one of Washington's regiments was quartered in the town the colonel, with many bows, asked the honor of dancing a minuet with her. Burn brightly, winter fire, and weave romances of the past as your smoke curls up the chimney of the happy home! No novelist can write such stories as those which your bright light recalls of childhood's days and those of early man or womanhood, and plighted love and marriage bells, and the advent of the infant stranger, and the voices that made such tender music in our hearts, and the partings to meet again and the partings to meet hereafter in a home where tears and partings are no more. " Home, Sweet Home ! " Unbidden the simple melody, more sung with heart and voice through the wide world than any hymn of praise or national anthem, comes into the mind and flows from the fingers to the page: "'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble,There's no place like home!" A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there. Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere 1 Home, home, sweet, sweet home! There's no place like home ! There's no place like home ! *'An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain! O, give me my lowly thatched cottage again ! The birds singing gayly, that came at my call- Give me them ! — and the peace of mind, dearer than alli Home, home, sweet, sweet home ! There's no place like home! There's no place like home I " Such are the h'nes as John Howard Payne wrote them, and as they were punctuated by himself. A glance in retrospect at his own wandering and changeful life gives them a stronger force and deeper meaning. The beautiful frontispiece to this volume shows us Payne's own fireside, but for manj'' years of his eventful career he had no home. It is a sad comment on his world-famous song that scarce one of his biographers has recorded even the time and place of his birth correctly. All sorts of fables have been written about him and his poem. Some have said that he was starving in London when, on a bitter night beneath a street lamp, he wrote in anguish his plaintive melody. But it was not so. He himself has left us the true story. The poem was written as an interlude in his " Clari, the Maid of Milan," an opera in three acts. In 1835, while at New Orleans, when questioned as to the music of the song, he told his friend, Mr. James Rees, of Philadelphia, that the air to which he had written ihe words was not wholly original with Henry R. Bishop, its composer, and director of the orchestra at Covent Garden Theatre, where " Clari " was first performed on Thursday, May 8, 1823. " I first heard the air," said Payne, " in Italy.

The hearthstone; or, Life at home