he Puritans did not reach New York
harbor for a couple of hundred years thereafter, and then in the persons
of the members of the New England Society. It is seen that the same
influences are still at work, for the fact that these Puritans have
brought up in Delmonico's haven of rest is entirely owing to the
attractions of the cook. [Laughter and applause.]

The old Puritan was not the most rollicking, the jolliest, or the most
playful of men. He at times amused himself sadly; he was given to a mild
disregard of the conventionalities. He had suppressed bear-baiting, not,
it is believed, because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave
pleasure to the audience. He found the Indians were the proprietors of
the land, and he felt himself constrained to move against them with his
gun with a view to increasing the number of absentee landlords.
[Laughter and applause.] He found the Indians on one side and the
witches on the other. He was surrounded with troubles. He had to keep
the Indians under fire and the witches over it. These were some of the
things that reconciled that good man to sudden death. He frequently
wanted to set up a mark and swear at it, but his principles would not
permit him. He never let the sun go down upon his wrath, but he, no
doubt, often wished that he was in that region near the pole where the
sun does not go down for six months at a time, and gives wrath a fair
chance to materialize. He was a thoughtful man. He spent his days
inventing snow-ploughs and his evenings in sipping hot rum and
ruminating upon the probable strength of the future Prohibition vote.
Those were times when the wives remonstrated with their husbands
regarding the unfortunate and disappointing results of too much drink,
particularly when it led the men to go out and shoot at Indians--and
miss them. [Long continued laughter.] It is supposed that these men,
like many others, generally began drinking on account of the bite of a
snake, and usually had to quit on account of attacks from the same
reptiles.

But, Mr. President, if you will allow me a few words of becoming gravity
with which to retract any aspersions which I may have inadvertently cast
upon the sacred person of the ancient Puritan, I assure you I will use
those words with a due sense of the truth of the epigram--that "gravity
is a stratagem invented to conceal the poverty of the mind." That rugged
old Puritan, firm of purpose and stout of heart, had been fittingly
t