very well as an aid to the memory in school, but when the boys went into business it often led to inconvenience.  When a boy got a situation in a grocery-store and customers were waiting for their change, he never could tell the product of two numbers without commencing at the beginning of the table and singing up till he had reached those numbers.  In case the customer’s ears had not received a proper musical training, this practice often injured the business of the store. [Laughter.]

It is said that the Yankee has always manifested a disposition for making money, but he never struck a proper field for the display of his genius until we got to making paper money. [Laughter.] Then every man who owned a printing-press wanted to try his hand at it.  I remember that in Washington ten cents’ worth of rags picked up in the street would be converted the next day into thousands of dollars.

An old mule and cart used to haul up the currency from the Printing Bureau to the door of the Treasury Department.  Every morning, as regularly as the morning came, that old mule would back up and dump a cart-load of the sinews of war at the Treasury. [Laughter.] A patriotic son of Columbia, who lived opposite, was sitting on the doorstep of his house one morning, looking mournfully in the direction of the mule.  A friend came along, and seeing that the man did not look as pleasant as usual, said to him, “What is the matter?  It seems to me you look kind of disconsolate this morning.”  “I was just thinking,” he replied, “what would become of this government if that old mule was to break down.” [Laughter and applause.] Now they propose to give us a currency which is brighter and heavier, but not worth quite as much as the rags.  Our financial horizon has been dimmed by it for some time, but there is a lining of silver to every cloud.  We are supposed to take it with 4121/2 grains of silver—­a great many more grains of allowance. [Laughter.] Congress seems disposed to pay us in the “dollar of our daddies”—­in the currency which we were familiar with in our childhood.  Congress seems determined to pay us off in something that is “child-like and Bland.” [Laughter and applause.] But I have detained you too long already. [Cries of “No, no; go on!”]

Why, the excellent President of your Society has for the last five minutes been looking at me like a man who might be expected, at any moment, to break out in the disconsolate language of Bildad the Shuhite to the patriarch Job, “How long will it be ere ye make an end of words?” Let me say then, in conclusion, that, coming as I do from the unassuming State of Pennsylvania, and standing in the presence of the dazzling genius of New England, I wish to express the same degree of humility that was expressed by a Dutch Pennsylvania farmer in a railroad car, at the breaking out of the war.  A New Englander came in who had just heard of the fall of Fort Sumter, and he was describing it to the farmer and his fellow-passengers.