Forty-five years after his childish farewell to it, Henry Clay stood once more (in 1840), and for the last time, in the humble home of his fathers, and was rejoiced to find the house where he was born and reared, still essentially unchanged. Venerable grandames, who were blooming matrons in his infancy, had long since indicated to their sons and daughters the room wherein he was born; and the spring whence the family had drawn their supplies of water wore a familiar aspect, though the hickory which formerly shaded it, and was noted for the excellence of its nuts, had passed away. Over the graves of his father and grandparents the plough had passed and repassed for years, and he only fixed their position by the decaying stump of a pear-tree, which had flourished in his childhood, and often ministered to his gratification. Beyond these, nothing answered to the picture in his memory, and he would not have recognized the spot, had he awoke there unconscious of the preceding journey. Familiar groves and orchards had passed away, while pines which he left shrubs, just dotting with perennial green the surface of the exhausted "old fields," unhappily too common throughout the Southern States, had grown up into dense and towering forests, which waved him a stately adieu, as he turned back refreshed and calmed, to the heated and dusty highway of public life. The boy Henry, spent five years in Richmond,--only the first in the store where his mother had placed him; three of the others in the office of Mr. Clerk-in-Chancery Peter Tinsley; the last in that of Attorney-General Brooke. From Mr. Tinsley, he learned to write a remarkably plain, neat, and elegant hand,--more like a schoolmistress's best, than a great lawyer and politician, and this characteristic it retained to the last. From Mr. Tinsley, Mr. Brooke, and perhaps still more from the illustrious Chancellor Wythe, who employed him as his amanuensis, and repaid him with his friendship and counsel, young Clay derived his knowledge of the principles of Common Law, whereof he was, all his life, a devoted champion. At length, in November, 1797, when still lacking some months of his legal majority, he left Richmond and Virginia, for the location he had chosen--namely, the thriving village of Lexington, in the then rapidly growing Territory of Kentucky--the home of his eventful adult life of more than half a century. How he here was early recognized and honored as a Man of the People, and rapidly chosen (1803) member of the Legislature, once (1806) appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, and soon after (1809) elected out of, and by the legislature, to fill another and longer vacancy in that same dignified body; chosen in 1811 a Member of the more popular branch of Congress, and, immediately on his appearance on its floor, elected its Speaker--probably the highest compliment ever paid to a public man in this country--appointed thence (1814) a Plenipotentiary to Göttingen