etween William J. Bryan
and President Roosevelt, when Bryan charged the president with
stealing all his policies and ideas.

If the speaker grasped the peculiarities of his audience and its
temperament, his task was at once the most difficult and the most
delightful, and my friend, Mr. Arthur Dunn, has performed most
useful service in embalming a portion of Gridiron history in his
volume, "Gridiron Nights."

Pierpont Morgan, the greatest of American bankers, was much more
than a banker. He had a wonderful collection in his library and
elsewhere of rare books and works of art. He was always delightful
on the social side. He was very much pleased when he was elected
president of the New England Society. The annual dinner that year
was a remarkably brilliant affair. It was the largest in the
history of the organization. The principal speaker was William Everett,
son of the famous Edward Everett and himself a scholar of great
acquirements and culture. His speech was another evidence of
a very superior man mistaking his audience. He was principal of
the Adams Academy, that great preparatory institution for
Harvard University, and he had greatly enlarged its scope and
usefulness.

Mr. Everett evidently thought that the guests of the New England
Society of New York would be composed of men of letters, educators,
and Harvard graduates. Instead of that, the audience before him
were mainly bankers and successful business men whose Puritan
characteristics had enabled them to win great success in the
competitions in the great metropolis in every branch of business.
They were out for a good time and little else.

Mr. Everett produced a ponderous mass of manuscript and began
reading on the history of New England education and the influence
upon it of the Cambridge School. He had more than an hour of
material and lost his audience in fifteen minutes. No efforts of
the chairman could bring them to attention, and finally the educator
lost that control of himself which he was always teaching to the
boys and threw his manuscript at the heads of the reporters. From
their reports in their various newspapers the next day, they did
not seem to have absorbed the speech by this original method.

Choate and I were both to speak, and Choate came first. As usual,
he threw a brick at me. He mentioned that a reporter had come to
him and said: "Mr. Choate, I have Depew's speech carefully prepared,
with the applause and laughter