“That if he had a friend that loved her,
  He should but teach him how to tell his stories,
  And that would win her.”

I would, gentlemen, it were in my power to present, as on the mirror in the Arabian tale, the various scenes in our extended country, where the master-mind of our guest is at this moment acting.  In the empty school-room, the boy at his evening task has dropped his grammar, that he may roam with Oliver or Nell.  The traveller has forgotten the fumes of the crowded steamboat, and is far off with our guest, among the green valleys and hoary hills of old England.  The trapper, beyond the Rocky Mountains, has left his lonely tent, and is unroofing the houses in London with the more than Mephistopheles at my elbow.  And, perhaps, in some well-lighted hall, the unbidden tear steals from the father’s eye, as the exquisite sketch of the poor schoolmaster and his little scholar brings back the form of that gifted boy, whose “little hand” worked its wonders under his guidance, and who, in the dawning of intellect and warm affections, was summoned from the school-room and the play-ground forever.  Or to some bereaved mother the tender sympathies and womanly devotion, the touching purity of little Nell, may call up the form where dwelt that harmonious soul, which uniting in itself God’s best gifts, for a short space shed its celestial light upon her household, and then vanishing, “turned all hope into memory.”

But it is not to scenes like these that I would now recall you.  I would that my voice could reach the ear of every admirer of our guest throughout the land, that with us they might welcome him, on this, his first public appearance to our shores.  Like the rushing of many waters, the response would come to us from the bleak hills of Canada, from the savannas of the South, from the prairies of the West, uniting in an “earthquake voice” in the cheers with which we welcome Charles Dickens to this new world.

ANDREW V. V. RAYMOND

THE DUTCH AS ENEMIES

[Speech of Rev. Dr. Andrew V. V. Raymond at the thirteenth annual dinner of the Holland Society of New York, January 12, 1898.  The President, John W. Vrooman, said:  “I must now make good a promise, and permit me to illustrate it by a brief story.  A minister about to perform the last rites for a dying man, a resident of Kentucky, said to him with solemnity that he hoped he was ready for a better land.  The man instantly rallied and cried out, ’Look here, Mr. Minister, there ain’t no better land than Kentucky!’ To secure the attendance of our genial and eloquent College President I made a promise to him to state publicly at this time that there is no better college in the world than Union College; that there is no better president in the world than the president of old Union; and I may add that there is no better man than my valued friend, President Andrew V. V. Raymond, of Union College, who will respond