And George Augustus Sala came in at the last moment, just when I was about to go without compliments altogether.  And that man was a gifted man.  They just called on him instantaneously, while he was going to sit down, to introduce the stranger, and Sala, made one of those marvellous speeches which he was capable of making.  I think no man talked so fast as Sala did.  One did not need wine while he was making a speech.  The rapidity of his utterance made a man drunk in a minute.  An incomparable speech was that, an impromptu speech, and—­an impromptu speech is a seldom thing, and he did it so well.

He went into the whole history of the United States, and made it entirely new to me.  He filled it with episodes and incidents that Washington never heard of, and he did it so convincingly that although I knew none of it had happened, from that day to this I do not know any history but Sala’s.

I do not know anything so sad as a dinner where you are going to get up and say something by-and-by, and you do not know what it is.  You sit and wonder and wonder what the gentleman is going to say who is going to introduce you.  You know that if he says something severe, that if he will deride you, or traduce you, or do anything of that kind, he will furnish you with a text, because anybody can get up and talk against that.

Anybody can get up and straighten out his character.  But when a gentleman gets up and merely tells the truth about you, what can you do?

Mr. Austin has done well.  He has supplied so many texts that I will have to drop out a lot of them, and that is about as difficult as when you do not have any text at all.  Now, he made a beautiful and smooth speech without any difficulty at all, and I could have done that if I had gone on with the schooling with which I began.  I see here a gentleman on my left who was my master in the art of oratory more than twenty-five years ago.

When I look upon the inspiring face of Mr. Depew, it carries me a long way back.  An old and valued friend of mine is he, and I saw his career as it came along, and it has reached pretty well up to now, when he, by another miscarriage of justice, is a United States Senator.  But those were delightful days when I was taking lessons in oratory.

My other master the Ambassador-is not here yet.  Under those two gentlemen I learned to make after-dinner speeches, and it was charming.

You know the New England dinner is the great occasion on the other side of the water.  It is held every year to celebrate the landing of the Pilgrims.  Those Pilgrims were a lot of people who were not needed in England, and you know they had great rivalry, and they were persuaded to go elsewhere, and they chartered a ship called Mayflower and set sail, and I have heard it said that they pumped the Atlantic Ocean through that ship sixteen times.

They fell in over there with the Dutch from Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and a lot of other places with profane names, and it is from that gang that Mr. Depew is descended.