erican turkey. After this description of a
Pilgrim festival day who shall ever again say the Pilgrims could not be
merry if they had half a chance to be so. Why, if the Harvard and Yale
football teams had been on hand with their great national game of
banging each others' eyes and breaking bones promiscuously, they could
not have added to the spirit of the day though they might to its variety
of pastime. [Laughter.]

It is interesting to remember in this connection that in the earlier
years of the colonies, Thanksgiving day did not come every year. It came
at various periods of the year from May to December, and the intervals
between them sometimes four or five years, gradually shortened and then
finally settled into an annual festival on the last Thursday of
November. A few years ago two Governors of Maine ventured to appoint a
day in December for Thanksgiving. Neither of them was re-elected.
[Laughter.] The crowning step in this development, which is now
national, was when the fortunes of our late war were in favor of the
Union, and a proclamation for a national Thanksgiving was issued by our
then President, dear old Abraham Lincoln. [Applause.] That the festival
shall hereafter and forever be national is a part of our unwritten law.
[Applause.] It will thus be seen that we, the sons of the Pilgrims, may
fairly and modestly claim that this feature of our national life, like
most of the others that are valuable, proceeded directly from Plymouth
Rock. The New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, will ever honor
the work and the memory of the fathers. As in the sweet lines of Bryant:

"Till where the sun, with softer fires,
Looks on the vast Pacific's sleep,
The children of the Pilgrim sires
This hallowed day, like us, shall keep."

[General applause.]

WILLIAM WINTER

TRIBUTE TO JOHN GILBERT

[Speech of William Winter at a dinner given by the Lotos Club, New
York City, November 30, 1878, to John Gilbert, in honor of the
fiftieth anniversary of his first appearance on the stage. Whitelaw
Reid presided. William Winter responded to the toast "The Dramatic
Critic."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--I thank you very gratefully for
this kind welcome, and I think it a privilege to be allowed to take part
in a festival so delightful as this, and join with you in paying respect
to a name so justly renowned and honored as that of John Gilbert. I
cannot hope adequately