e present at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the
Society, and the two hundred and sixtieth of the landing of the Pilgrims
at Metropolitan Concert Hall." [Laughter.]

Such is the ignorance of those of us upon whom Providence did not
sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England, that I never
knew, until I received that note, anything about the landing of the
Pilgrims at Metropolitan Concert Hall. This certainly will be sad news
to communicate to those pious people who assembled in Brooklyn last
night, and who still rest happy in the belief that the Pilgrims landed
on Plymouth Church. [Laughter.] From the day they have chosen for the
anniversary, it seems very evident that the Pilgrims must have landed
somewhere one day before they struck Plymouth Rock. [Laughter.]

The poet Longfellow tells us, in one of his short poems, "learn to labor
and to wait." I have labored through about twenty-five courses at this
table, and then I have waited until this hour, in the hope that I might
be spared the inevitable ordeal. But when the last plate had been
removed, and your president, who is a stern man of duty, rapped upon the
table, I saw there was no escape, and the time had come when he was
going to present to you one of the most popular of all dishes at a New
England banquet, tongue garnished with brains. He seems, following the
late teachings of Harvard and Yale, to have invited the guests to enter
for a sort of skull-race. [Laughter.] Now, I suppose that, in calling
first upon those on his right and left, it is a matter of convenience
for himself, and he has acted from the same motives that actuated a
newly fledged dentist who, when his first patient applied, determined to
exercise all that genius and understanding which Boston men generally
exercise in the practice of their profession. The patient, coming from
the country, told him he wanted two back teeth, which he pointed out to
him, pulled. The dentist placed him in a chair, and in a few moments he
had pulled out his two front teeth. The patient left the chair, and it
occurred to him that the circumstance might be deemed of sufficient
importance to call the dentist's attention to it. He said, "I told you
to pull out these two back teeth." "Yes," said the dentist, "so you did;
but I found that the front ones were kind of handier to get at."
[Laughter and applause.] I suppose the reason your president called upon
those of us nearest the platform to-night was becau