reater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all the
missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have declared,
preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other
poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people is to the
boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met with a
furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to look at
the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they
clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and
shouting, "Here's to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk
eggs grew before."

Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have
been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared
nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these
two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and
was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education
would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be
taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure
of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however, to betray
anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and ungrateful, and
so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn butter,
till the whole place sticks and reeks with it.

Of course, the reader--especially if he has never been asked to a
personal dinner of this sort--will be saying that the fault is not with
the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct the
ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made the
object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the
speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the
example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the
banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the
supper given to AEschylus on the hundredth performance of the _OEdipus_
of Sophocles.

The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the
banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the
occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the
prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed that
he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was more
in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due as
mu