as
generously as in the Hall, and that has made the inheritance of the
ploughman's son more precious than a Dukedom. We shall, as your
President has said, be better, and not worse citizens of this great
Republic; we shall play our part all the more worthily, in public or
private station, if every fibre of our being thrills to an auld Scotch
sang, and we feel in our inmost heart that--

"Where the caller breezes sweep
Across the mountain's breast,
Where the free in soul are nurst,
Is the land that we lo'e best."

SIMEON FORD

ME AND SIR HENRY

[Speech of Simeon Ford at a banquet given to Sir Henry Irving by the
Lotos Club, New York City, October 29, 1899. The President, Frank R.
Lawrence, occupied the chair.]

GENTLEMEN:--I cannot but envy you the intellectual treat in
which you are revelling, in being permitted to listen to the resistless
eloquence of both me and Sir Henry Irving. It is not often that two such
stars as me and Sir Henry will consent to twinkle in the same firmament.
But your gifted President can accomplish wonders. He is what Weber and
Fields[3] call a "hypnotister."

As the President has said, I am not one of the set speakers. I just blew
in here, and blew in my good money to attend this feast, like the rest
of the rank and file, and now I have to work my passage as well. I am
simply put in as a filler. The President, with his awe-inspiring,
chill-producing gavel, is the "wrapper," and I am the filler; and you,
who smoke, have observed ere this that a mighty fine wrapper is often
associated with a very rank filler.

If I had had about twenty minutes' warning I could have prepared a
eulogy on Sir Henry, setting forth his virtues as a man and an actor in
such a way that he never would have recognized himself, and with such
eloquence that Dr. Greer [David H. Greer] would have looked like thirty
cents. But I did not get the twenty minutes, so poor Sir Henry must
content himself with the few scant bouquets with which he has already
been bombarded.

A sober, able-bodied eulogizer with a good address and a boiled shirt
can get a pretty steady winter's job in this Club at board wages. I
have, in my poor, weak way, eulogized several distinguished men in this
historic room, all of whom I am happy to say, are now convalescent. I
eulogized Joe Choate and he got a job at the Court of St. James; I
eulogized Horace Porter, and he is now playing one night stands at the
Moulin Rouge;