ntil the
close of the festivities he would remain your President, and when in the
end he bade you good-night he would do it for me, as well as for
himself, and wish you each and all a happy journey to your homes and a
safe return to these same tables one year from to-day. [Applause.]

JOHN FOORD

THE LAND O' CAKES

[Speech of John Foord at the 143d annual banquet of the St. Andrew's
Society of the State of New York, December 1, 1899. The speech was
delivered in response to the toast, "The Land O' Cakes."]

MR. PRESIDENT, MEMBERS AND GUESTS OF THE ST. ANDREW'S
SOCIETY:--I suppose there are some in this company who would find
it hard to tell the difference between a bear bannock and a pease scone.
For the benefit of such, I may be permitted to say that there was no
suggestion of fancy bread about the "cakes" with which the name of
Scotland has been associated. They were very plain bread, indeed, and
quite as destitute of leaven as that which the Children of Israel were
condemned to eat in the wilderness. The only sweetening they had came
from the fact that they were the fruit of honest toil; and hunger, as
you know, is "gude kitchen." Together with the "hale-some parritch,
chief o' Scotia's food," they formed the staff of life of a people whose
tastes were as simple as their ideals were high. "We cultivate
literature on a little oatmeal," was the motto proposed by Sydney Smith
for the "Edinburgh Review"; and, jocular as was the suggestion, it
touches the keynote of Scottish character and history. For, what have we
not done on a little oatmeal? Our fathers fought on it, worked on it,
thought and studied on it, wrote ballads and preached sermons on it, and
created the Scotland, kinship with which we are all so proud to claim,
on a diet chiefly composed of oat cakes and oatmeal porridge. On such
frugal fare, they subdued a harsh and stubborn soil and made it yield
its yearly toll of harvest; they took tribute of wool and mutton from
the moorland and the hillside, and of hide and beef from the fallow
lea; they levied on loch and sea to support their fisher-folk; and kept
the rock and the reel and the flying shuttle busy to clothe themselves
with homespun, so that the old Arbroath toast became a very epitome of
the vocations of that primitive time: "The life o' man, the death o'
fish, the shuttle, and the plough; corn, horn, linen, yarn, lint, and
tarry 'oo." Nay more, defying the rigors of an ungenial climat