How often and how fervently are those simple words sung out by earnest loyal hearts from end to end of the English-speaking world. The refrain has burst forth at Christmas gatherings, at home-comings from school, on every festive occasion, around all true home hearths, and its echo has been heard on plain and prairie, amid mountain peaks and forest fastness, as wanderers have in thought turned homeward. There is perhaps no place where the old tune and well loved words sound with more pathos, than when the refrain is raised in a prison audience and rolled through the chapel or around the gallery by a thousand manly voices. Heads are bowed, eyes grow dim with tears and sometimes lips tremble too much to frame the words. I have heard it thus and have tried to read the faces of the men as the song called up to them the past. Some have sung with a longing and yearning in which still lingered the note of glad possession, while for them arose a picture of a dear home-spot where they were still held in loving remembrance and to which in the future they would again be welcomed. Others under still deeper emotion have seen a vision of the home that was, the memory of childhood's happy hours gone forever with the passing of the mother-heart into the far-away grave. Fathers sometimes drop their heads upon the seats before them and strong men though they are, give way to bitter tears as they picture the little white-robed tots who kneel up in their beds to pray that papa may some day come home, and ask the mother over again in childish perplexity why he stays away so long, and then drop to sleep wondering at her tears. But some of those in the great audience know no home as a future bright spot, for they have never known the sacred influence which should be every man's birthright. Even in their hearts there is a longing to possess that which they have missed, and the song awakens a strange, untranslatable thrill that makes them feel lonely and forsaken without knowing why.