ve done our best at home to make ready our sisters when
they should go to the ball. When my brother Beecher, just now, closed
his speech with a Latin quotation, I took some satisfaction in
remembering that we taught him his Latin at the Boston Latin school. And
I could not but remember when I listened with such delight to the
address of Mr. Secretary Evarts, which you have just now been cheering,
that the first time I heard this persuasive and convincing orator, was
when he took the prize for elocution, a boy of thirteen, on the platform
in the great hall in our old schoolhouse in School Street. Nay, I
confess also, to a little feeling of local as well as national pride,
when the President of the United States [Rutherford B. Hayes] was
speaking. Just as he closes this remarkable administration, which is
going to stand out in history, distinguished indeed among all
administrations from the beginning, so pure has it been, so honorable
and so successful--just as he closes this administration he makes here
this statement of the principles on which are based the success of an
American statesman, in a few fit words so epigrammatic that they will be
cited as proverbs by our children and our children's children. I heard
that masterly definition of the laws which have governed the New
Englander, I took pride in remembering that the President also was a
graduate of our law school. These three are the little contributions
which Cinderella has been preparing in the last half-century, for the
first dinner-party of the Brooklyn Pilgrim Society. [Applause.]

I read in a New York newspaper in Washington the other day that
something done in Boston lately was done with the "usual Boston
intensity." I believe the remark was not intended to be a compliment,
but we shall take it as one, and are quite willing to accept the phrase.
I think it is true in the past, I hope it will be true in the future,
that we go at the things which we have to do with a certain intensity,
which I suppose we owe to these Puritan Fathers whom to-night we are
celebrating. Certainly we have gone at this business of emigration with
that intensity. It is perfectly true that there are in Brooklyn to-day
more people than there are in Boston, who were born in Boston from the
old New England blood. Not that Brooklyn has been any special favorite.
When I met last year in Kansas, a mass meeting of twenty-five thousand
of the old settlers and their children, my daughter said