Prithee, no more; thou dost talk nothing to me.
A few minutes before the coffee was brought in, each guest received what purported to be a telegram from Boston, dated April 1, 1883. The message read as follows:
The dinner bell, the dinner bell
Is ringing loud and clear,
Through hill and plain, through street and lane
It echoes far and near.
I hear the voice! I go, I go!
Prepare your meat and wine;
They little heed their future need
Who pay not when they dine.
—O.W.H.
The back of the despatch was decorated with two pictures; one showing Doctor Fordyce Barker ringing a dinner bell and brandishing a knife and fork, the other Doctor Holmes hurrying to answer the bell, with a pile of books under one arm and a bundle of bones under the other.
Among the guests present were George William Curtis, Hon. William M. Evarts, Bishop Clark, Whitelaw Reid, Doctors Post, Emmett, Sayre, Billing, Vanderpoel Metcalfe, Detmoold Draper, Doremus, Hammond, St. J. Roosa, Flint, Dana, Peabody, Ranney, Jacobi, Austin, and many others.
The first toast was as follows:
The hour's now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear
Obey, and be attentive.
—The Tempest.
After a few brief words of introduction, Doctor Barker called upon Doctor A.H. Smith to complete the greeting, which he did in the following happy lines:
You've heard of the deacon's one hoss shay
Which, finished in Boston the self-same day
That the City of Lisbon went to pot,
Did a century's service, and then was not.
But the record's at fault which says that it burst
Into simply a heap of amorphous dust,
For after the wreck of that wonderful tub
Out of the ruins they saved a hub;
And the hub has since stood for Boston town,
Hub of the universe, note that down.
But an orderly hub as all will own,
Must have something central to turn upon,
And, rubber-cushioned, and true and bright
We have the axle here to-night.
Thrice welcome then to our festal board
The doctor-poet, so doubly stored
With science as well as with native wit,
Poeta nascitur, you know, non fit,
led to dissect with knife or pen
His subjects dead or living men;
With thought sublime on every page
To swell the veins with virtuous rage,
Or with a syringe to inject them
With sublimate to disinfect them;
To show with demonstrator's art
The complex chambers of the heart,
Or armed with a diviner skill
To make it pulsate at his will;
With generous verse to celebrate
The loaves and fishes of some giver;
And then proceed to demonstrate
The lobes and fissures of the liver;
To soothe the pulses of the brain
With poetry's enchanting strain.
Or to describe to class uproarious
Pes hippocampi accessorious;
erve with fervor of appeal
The sluggish muscles into steel,
Or, pulling their attachments, show
Whence they arise and where they go;
To fire the eye by wit consummate,
Or draw the aqueous humor from it;
In times of peril give the tone
To public feeling, called backbone,
Or to discuss that question solemn,
The muscles of the spinal column.
And now I close my artless ditty
As per agreement with committee,
And making place for those more able
I leave the subject on the table.