sex, I feel bound to
stand at the Senator's end of the room--not, however, too near the
Senator's chair, for it may be dangerous to take Woman too near that
"good-looking man." [Laughter and applause.] Therefore, gentlemen, I
stand between these two chairs--the Army on my right [General Hancock],
the Navy on my left [Admiral Farragut]--to hold over their heads a name
that conquers both--Woman! [Applause.] The Chairman has pictured a
vice-admiral tied for a little while to a mast; but it is the spirit of
my sentiment to give you a vice-admiral tied life-long to a master.
[Applause.] In the absence of woman, therefore, from this gilded feast,
I summon her to your golden remembrance. There is an old English
song--older, sir, than the Pilgrims:--

"By absence, this good means I gain,
That I can catch her
Where none can watch her,
In some close corner of my brain:
There I embrace and kiss her:
And so I both enjoy and miss her!"

You must not forget, Mr. President, in eulogizing the early men of New
England, who are your clients to-night, that it was only through the
help of the early women of New England, who are mine, that your boasted
heroes could ever have earned their title of the Pilgrim Fathers. [Great
laughter.] A health, therefore, to the women in the cabin of the
Mayflower! A cluster of May-flowers themselves, transplanted from summer
in the old world to winter in the new! Counting over those matrons and
maidens, they numbered, all told, just eighteen. Their names are now
written among the heroines of history! For as over the ashes of Cornelia
stood the epitaph "The Mother of the Gracchi," so over these women of
the Pilgrimage we write as proudly "The Mothers of the Republic."
[Applause.] There was good Mistress Bradford, whose feet were not
allowed of God to kiss Plymouth Rock, and who, like Moses, came only
near enough to see but not to enter the Promised Land. She was washed
overboard from the deck--and to this day the sea is her grave and Cape
Cod her monument! [Applause.] There was Mistress Carver, wife of the
first governor, and who, when her husband fell under the stroke of
sudden death, followed him first with heroic grief to the grave, and
then, a fortnight after, followed him with heroic joy up into Heaven!
[Applause.] There was Mistress White--the mother of the first child
born to the New England Pilgrims on this continent. And it was a good
omen, sir, that this historic babe was brought