d when sometimes he does so it
seems rude.

The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner may report a
variety of food for the others, but for the honored guest the sole
course is taffy, with plenty of drawn butter in a lordly dish. The
honored guest is put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped open
for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming drawn butter from
every limb. The chairman has poured it over him with a generous ladle in
his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from the
lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another in the
application, searching out some corner or crevice of his personality
which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up to
overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and
roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of brilliant
intuition when a speaker seizes upon some forgotten point in the honored
guest's character or career and drenches it with drawn butter.

To what good end do men so flatter and befool one of their harmless
fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural
achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of
inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the
climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth
filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place,
proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place
before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He
may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation,
some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have
mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of
the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but
that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another may
have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly
treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to
impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered
palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored
guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to
make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this
in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to
lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is
a g