The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-08-10
1.-THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES"

Many, many years before John How ard Payne composed the immortal song, ''Home, Sweet Home," which occurs in his opera, .tClari, or the Maid of Milan,' ? the thoughts of men turned backward to the places of their birth. This senti- ment is close akin to love of family, and friends, and to the form of patriot ism which makes the defense of ones native land, ones home, sacred duty.
 When the wandering minstrel travelled about, singing the ballads that charmed listeners in ancient inns, and were heard by dusty road-sides with no less delight than in baronial halls, he had in his repertory, we make no doubt, songs of home. Tyranny and economic pressure have caused whole populations to shift from one part of the world to another, but even after centuries have elapsed the land from whence they came is still ''home." They cherish and perpetuate the old customs. although generations have since been born that never saw the land of their fathers. Before blind Homer sang, in the dim ages when man kind was chipping out stone weapons with which to attack the monsters that roanled the plains of Asia, there was some crude form of minstrelsy that glorified home, though home were but cave, where man fought for posses sion with wild animals. Out of the fam ily grew the tribe, and out of the tribe the nation, and one roof may have shel- tered a race in it's incipiency.
 Born in the far days when there was not a great deal of difference between man and the brutes around him, this attachment to home and to the familiar scenes of childhood and youth has sur vived, as one of the strongest of hu- manity's traits. There is a good deal of truth in the observation that human nature never changes. This IS why the earliest minstrels and later the poets, who have for some thousands of years composed their masterpieces, with eyes sin a fine frenzy rolling" have left be- hind them innunerable tributes to home and "the old familiar faces" Time casts a xIafnor over our early recOllec- tions and bIots out the unpleasant ex- Iperiences, leaving composite picture of happiness before the mind And, after a while, the swift revolving years may lessen the vividneSs with which these images are engraved on our mem ory, but they are never quite Obliterated-
 To the person of ardent tempera- ment, who is given to retrospeetlon, incidents of his youth are often invested with a greater show of reality than are the experiences of his. later life Let him but clasp the hand of a bOyhood friend, and the joys and sorrows of halt a lifetime drop as if by magic from his recollection. He is boy again, and with this old comrade, now growing gray, perhaps, he is once more roaming the hills and exploring the valleys, as they did when they were lads together, on brave adventures bent. Let him but glimpse from the window of an ineOm- ing train, the hills he climbed when he was making the acquaintance of Tom Sawyer and HucHeberry Finn; or the stream where he learned to swim, with outcries, half of terror and half of Joys the while swallowing quantities of muddy water and shuddering at the thought that venomous, yeilow-belhed moccasins had been seen more than once stunning themselves on the surface of the swimming hole, and host of reeoi- Ilections crowd fast upon him. and are given substance and form when he meets again the friends of other days who, thank God, are still his friends!
 Orgy genius can put into imperlshaDie prose or verse what most of us feel about the home town and the associations that endeared it to us when life held more Of ioy than sorrow, more of hope than despair, but we know that it is m our souls and will abide there, even though we strive in vain to give it utteranee-