me patriotic inscriptions. There is one, a quotation from
President McKinley, that conveys an admonition the disregard of which
leads to consequences we often have occasion to deplore: "The
vigilance of the Citizen is the safety of the Republic."

At the right of the hall are two rooms, locked now, but serving as
parlors when the sad old house was a bright, beautiful home. A steep
Colonial stairway leads to a hall on the second floor, where again
there are inscriptions on the walls to remind the visitor of his
duties as a citizen of the nation over which the Star-Spangled Banner
yet waves.

On the second floor the first sign of life appeared. A door stood
slightly ajar, and in answer to a touch a tall woman with a face of
underlying tragedy and a solitary aspect that fitted well with the
loneliness of the old house appeared and courteously invited me to
enter. She is the care-taker of the mansion, bears an aristocratic old
Virginia name, and is wrapped around with that air of gloomily
garnered memories characteristic of women who were in the heart of the
crucial period of our history. I am not surprised when she tells me
that she watched the battle of Fredericksburg from her window as she
lay ill in her room, and that she witnessed the burning of Richmond
after the surrender. I recognize the fact that life has been a harder
battle, since all her own have passed over the line and left her to
the lonely conflict, than was ever a contest in those days of war.

She tells me that the Key relics have all been taken to the Betsy Ross
house in Philadelphia. What they were she does not know, for they were
all packed in boxes when she first came to the Key mansion. The only
object left from the possessions of the man who made that old dwelling
a shrine upon which Americans of to-day ought to place offerings of
patriotism is an old frame in a small room at the end of the hall. On
the bottom of the frame is printed in large black letters the name,
Francis Scott Key. Some jagged fragments within the frame indicate
that something, either picture or flag, has been hastily and
carelessly removed.

Finding no relic of the man whose life once glorified the now dark and
gloomy house, I hold with the greater tenacity the mental picture I
have of the old flag I used to see in the National Museum. Faded,
discolored, and tattered, it is yet the most glorious piece of bunting
our country owns to-day--the flag that floated over Fort McHenry