hey keep on calling her close-fisted. They even blaspheme
her weather--her warm-hearted summers and her magnificent winters. There
is, to be sure, a time along in March--but let that pass. [Laughter.]

I refer to this without the least irritation. I do not complain of it.
On the contrary, I glory in it. I love her for the enemies she has made.
[Laughter.]

She is the church member among the communities, and must catch it
accordingly. It is the saints who are always in the wrong. [Laughter.]

Elijah troubled Israel. Daniel was a nuisance in Babylon. And long may
New England be such as to make it an object to find fault with her.
[Hearty applause.]

Such she will be so long as she is true to herself--true to her great
traditions; true to the principles of which her life was begotten; so
long as her public spirit has supreme regard to the higher ranges of the
public interest; so long as in her ancient glorious way she leaves the
power of the keys in the hands of the people; so long as her patriotism
springs, as in the beginning it sprang, from the consciousness of rights
wedded to the consciousness of duties; so long as by her manifold
institutions of learning, humanity, religion, thickly sown,
multitudinous, universal, she keeps the law of the Forefathers' faith,
that "Man lives not by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out
of the mouth of God." [Prolonged applause.]

* * * * *

THE SOLDIER STAMP

[Speech of Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford, Conn., at the
eighty-sixth annual dinner of the New England Society in the city
of New York, December 22, 1891. J. Pierpont Morgan, the President,
occupied the chair. Mr. Twichell responded to the toast,
"Forefathers' Day."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--The
posture of my mind the last fortnight relative to the duty of the
present hour--which, indeed, I was proud to be assigned to, as I ought
to have been, but which has been a black care to me ever since I
undertook it--has a not inapt illustration in the case of the old New
England parson who, when asked why he was going to do a certain thing
that had been laid upon him, yet the thought of which affected him with
extreme timidity, answered: "I wouldn't if I didn't suppose it had been
foreordained from all eternity--and I'm a good mind to not as it is."
[Laughter.] However, I have the undisguised good-will of my audience t