lady
said to her clergyman, who was paying her an afternoon call, of her
little boy, who bore the marks of a struggle: "Johnny has been a bad
little boy to-day; he has been fighting and has got a black eye." "So I
see," said the clergyman. "Come into the next room with me, Johnny, and
I will pray with you." "You had better go home and pray with your own
little boy, he has got two black eyes." [Laughter.]

The forty-one families who came in the "Mayflower," and the thousand of
English Puritans who came in the next decade, are not entitled to all
the credit for the development of the country, for there were others of
their kind in Virginia, and, unlike the Boers of the Transvaal, they
gave later comers a show. [Laughter and applause.] The process of
appropriation by one people of a country, even if they are the first
settlers, can be carried too far even for advantage to them or to
inspire credulity in its possibility. A returned traveller, relating his
adventures, said: "The most remarkable experience I ever had occurred a
short time ago in Russia. I was sleighing on the Steppes, miles from my
destination, when, to my horror, I found I was pursued by a pack of
wolves; I fired blindly into the pack, killing one of them, and, to my
relief, saw the others stop to devour him; after doing this, however,
they still came on. I repeated the shot, with the same result, and each
shot gave me an opportunity to whip up my horses. Finally there was only
one wolf left, yet on it came with its fierce eyes glaring in
anticipation of a good hot supper." "Hold on, there," said a man who had
been listening, "by your way of reckoning, that last wolf must have had
the rest of the pack inside of him." [Laughter.] "Well," said the
traveller, "now I remember it, he did wobble a bit." [Laughter.]

It was wise in our forefathers to welcome those who, like them, were
pioneers in the wilderness, to give them equal rights and to assimilate
them into American citizenship. The qualities of which we boast in our
Pilgrim ancestors still linger with their descendants, though among
75,000,000 of people there may not be enough to go around. The
expectation of it would be what Dr. Johnson said of a man who had
married his third wife, as the "triumph of hope over experience."
[Laughter.] But we must, on occasions like this, make some assumptions,
like the lady of whom a friend said: "She puts on a good deal of style
now she has a box at the opera." "Good g