.

Before I get to the higgledy-piggledy point, as Mr. Howells suggested
I do, I want to thank you, gentlemen, for this very high honor you are
doing me, and I am quite competent to estimate it at its value. I see
around me captains of all the illustrious industries, most distinguished
men; there are more than fifty here, and I believe I know thirty-nine of
them well. I could probably borrow money from--from the others, anyway.
It is a proud thing to me, indeed, to see such a distinguished company
gather here on such an occasion as this, when there is no foreign prince
to be feted--when you have come here not to do honor to hereditary
privilege and ancient lineage, but to do reverence to mere moral
excellence and elemental veracity-and, dear me, how old it seems to make
me! I look around me and I see three or four persons I have known so
many, many years. I have known Mr. Secretary Hay--John Hay, as the
nation and the rest of his friends love to call him--I have known John
Hay and Tom Reed and the Reverend Twichell close upon thirty-six years.
Close upon thirty-six years I have known those venerable men. I have
known Mr. Howells nearly thirty-four years, and I knew Chauncey Depew
before he could walk straight, and before he learned to tell the truth.
Twenty-seven years ago, I heard him make the most noble and eloquent and
beautiful speech that has ever fallen from even his capable lips. Tom
Reed said that my principal defect was inaccuracy of statement. Well,
suppose that that is true. What's the use of telling the truth all the
time? I never tell the truth about Tom Reed--but that is his defect,
truth; he speaks the truth always. Tom Reed has a good heart, and he
has a good intellect, but he hasn't any judgment. Why, when Tom Reed
was invited to lecture to the Ladies' Society for the Procreation
or Procrastination, or something, of morals, I don't know what it
was--advancement, I suppose, of pure morals--he had the immortal
indiscretion to begin by saying that some of us can't be optimists, but
by judiciously utilizing the opportunities that Providence puts in our
way we can all be bigamists. You perceive his limitations. Anything he
has in his mind he states, if he thinks it is true. Well, that was true,
but that was no place to say it--so they fired him out.

A lot of accounts have been settled here tonight for me; I have held
grudges against some of these people, but they have all been wiped out
by the very handsom