Page:Masterpieces of American Humor (Little Blue Book 959).djvu/56

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MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN HUMOR

tions, who asked me what business called me to Philadelphia. I replied: "I am going to attend the annual banquet of the New England Society of Pennsylvania; which I understand to be the most important event that takes place in that State." He remarked: "I did not know there was such a society, nor did I know there were enough Yankees in Philadelphia to form a decent crowd around a dinner-table; because the Yankees can't make money in Philadelphia, and a Yankee never stays where he can't make money."

It is a most extraordinary thing that one should come from New York to Philadelphia for the purpose of attending a New England dinner. It is a most extraordinary thing that a New England dinner should be held in Philadelphia. Your chairman to-night spoke of the hard condition of the Puritans who landed on Plymouth Rock. Let me say that if the, Puritans had come up the Delaware, landed here, and begun life with terrapin and canvas-back duck, there never would have been any Puritan story to be retailed from year to year at Fore-fathers' dinners. If William Penn had ever contemplated that around his festive board would sit those Puritans with whom he was familiar in England, he would have exclaimed: "Let all the savages of the continent come, but not them.” It is one of the pleasing peculiarities of the Puritan mind, as evinced in the admirable address of Mr. Curtis here to-night (and when you have heard Mr. Curtis, you have heard the best that a New Englander, who has been educated in New York, can do), that when