numerous recalcitrant subjects constantly raising
Cain in their dominions, the recital of how the Pilgrims went
voluntarily to a distant country to live, where their scalps were in
danger, must have been a pleasant picture. [Laughter.]

If I am to have any reputation for brevity I must now close these
remarks. I remember a lesson in brevity I once received in a barber's
shop. An Irishman came in, and the unsteady gait with which he
approached the chair showed that he had been imbibing of the produce of
the still run by North Carolina Moonshiners. He wanted his hair cut, and
while the barber was getting him ready, went off into a drunken sleep.
His head got bobbing from one side to the other, and at length the
barber, in making a snip, cut off the lower part of his ear. The barber
jumped about and howled, and a crowd of neighbors rushed in. Finally the
demonstration became so great that it began to attract the attention of
the man in the chair, and he opened one eye and said, "Wh-wh-at's the
matther wid yez?" "Good Lord!" said the barber, "I've cut off the whole
lower part of your ear." "Have yez? Ah, thin, go on wid yer bizness--it
was too long, anyhow!" [Laughter.] If I don't close this speech, some
one of the company will be inclined to remark that it has been too long,
anyhow. [Cheers and laughter.]

* * * * *

A TRIP ABROAD WITH DEPEW

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-seventh annual dinner of
the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1882.
Josiah M. Fiske, the President, occupied the chair and called upon
General Porter to respond to the toast: "The Embarkation of the
Pilgrims."]

GENTLEMEN:--Last summer two pilgrims might have been seen
embarking from the port of New York to visit the land from which the
Pilgrim Fathers once embarked. One was the speaker who just sat down
[Chauncey M. Depew], and the other the speaker who has just arisen. I do
not know why we chose that particular time. Perhaps Mr. Choate, with his
usual disregard of the more accurate bounds of veracity, would have you
believe that we selected that time because it was a season when there
was likely to be a general vacation from dinners here. [Laughter.] Our
hopes of pleasure abroad had not risen to any dizzy height. We did not
expect that the land which so discriminating a band as the Pilgrim
Fathers had deliberately abandoned, and preferred New England th