blotted from the map of our beloved country, and the nation has
grown color-blind to blue and gray, it is with peculiar pleasure
that we welcome here to-night a distinguished and typical
representative of that noble people who live in that part of the
present North that used to be called Dixie, of whom he has himself
so beautifully and so truly said, 'If they bore themselves
haughtily in their hour of triumph, they bore defeat with splendid
fortitude. Their entire system crumbled and fell around them in
ruins; they remained unmoved; they suffered the greatest
humiliation of modern times; their slaves were put over them; they
reconquered their section and preserved the civilization of the
Anglo-Saxon.' It is not necessary, ladies and gentlemen, that I
should introduce the next speaker to you, for I doubt not that you
all belong to the multitude of mourners, who have wept real tears
with black Sam and Miss Annie beside the coffin of Marse Chan; but
I will call upon our friend, Thomas Nelson Page, to respond to the
next toast, 'The Debt Each Part of the Country Owes the Other.'"]


LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--I did not remember that I had written
anything as good as that which my friend has just quoted. It sounded to
me, as he quoted it, very good indeed. At any rate, it is very true,
and, perhaps, that it is true is the reason that you have done me the
honor to invite me here to-night. I have been sitting for an hour in
such a state of tremulousness and fright, facing this audience I was to
address, that the ideas I had carefully gathered together have, I fear,
rather taken flight; but I shall give them to you as they come, though
they may not be in quite as good order as I should like them. The gift
of after-dinner speaking is one I heard illustrated the other day very
well at a dinner at which my friend, Judge Bartlett and I were present.