was something more solid and well-pleasing. But better and more
wholesome than even this must it be, I should think, for men spending
their lives in the dusty glare of public life, to come back once a year
to our quiet shades and be, as Dr. Holmes has so delightfully sung,
plain Bill and Joe again. It must renew and revive in them the early
sweetness of their nature, the frank delight in simple things which
makes so large a part of the better happiness of life.

But, gentlemen, I will not longer detain you with the inevitable
suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from
under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy
foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace.
I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be
unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely
here with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: _Guilielmo Roberto
Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam
postprandialem irritam fecerunt._ I hope you understood my Latin
[laughter], and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of my
pronunciation [laughter]; but it is simply because I cannot help it.
Then on a blackboard behind me I could have written in large letters the
names of our guests who should make some brief dumb show of
acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make
yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in
the fact that I have consented at short notice to be one of the
performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not a
thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the
nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged for a little poem, I got
the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I don't
see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:--

"MY DEAR JAMES:--Somebody has written a note in your name
requesting me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he
professed to be interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it
is a forgery. I know you would not do such a thing as to ask a
brother rhymer, utterly exhausted by his centennial efforts, to
endanger his health and compromise his reputation by any damnable
iteration of spasmodic squeezing. [Laughter.] So I give you warning
that some dangerous person is using your name, and