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