noble structure, please God, in
his own lifetime, and convey it by free gift to you and yours forever;
and so the work is done, and so well done, to all seeming, that if you
care for the gift as your friend has cared for its creation, we may say,
as old Andrew Fairservice said of the cathedral in Glasgow, "Keep airn
and gunpooder aff it, and it will stand to the crack o'doom."

My friend and yours is also an Englishman and a Yorkshireman, as you
know, by birth and breeding, as I am also, and I am the more glad and
proud of what he has done for that reason; because I still love old
England with a very tender love after these forty years of absence, as I
know he does also. But I have had to notice how very many of us who came
here from England to find a home in the American republic, and it may be
make their fortune, can find nothing so good in this new world as that
they left behind them, and no matter how much wealth they may win, they
do nothing as a rule for the town they live in, like this your friend
has done in Spencer. He could not be content to be a mere exile from
England, he must be a citizen of the United States and blend his life
with the life in this new world which has made him so much more of a man
than he ever could have been had he stayed on that hill-side in old
Yorkshire. This is the true home of his heart and life, here he won his
wealth and found ample room to grow to be the man you honor, and here is
one proof among many he has given in all these years, that while he was
born in England and is proud of it, though he may not say so, he was
born again in America, and does not love the old land less but the new
land more, as every man must who comes here to share your life, if he is
worth his salt.

You will pardon me, I know, as you receive the gift, for this word in
praise of the giver, while he may find it hard to do so; but for that I
do not care, because in asking me to come here and say the word that was
in my heart he must run his risk and take it as it came to me, and
insisted on being said. Richard Sugden falls into line with our
home-born men far and wide, but especially in Massachusetts, who have
done or are ready to do some such thing as he has done now in
Spencer--building these public libraries in the towns where they live or
from which they went away to seek their fortune; public libraries, which
range with the schools and churches and the town halls; which are the
four-square defence