As for food, half of my friends have dug their graves with their teeth.

The tomb of the Saviour was a narrow and empty vault, precious only for its memories of the supreme tragedy of the centuries, but the new continent was to be the home and temple of the living God.

Blot out from the page of history the names of all the great actors of his time in the drama of nations, and preserve the name of Washington, and the century would be renowned.

My dinners have never interfered with my business. They have been my recreation. . . A public banquet, if eaten with thought and care, is no more of a strain than a dinner at home.

Neither realism nor romance furnishes a more striking and picturesque figure than that of Christopher Columbus. The mystery about his origin heightens the charm of his story.

Force was the factor in the government of the world when Christ was born, and force was the source and exercise of authority both by Church and State when Columbus sailed from Palos. The Wise Men traveled from the East toward the West under the guidance of the Star of Bethlehem. The spirit of the equality of all men before God and the law moved westward from Calvary with its revolutionary influence upon old institutions, to the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus carried it westward across the seas.

But the closer we study their lives, and the better we know their deeds, the more profound is our admiration and the greater our reverence for the Pilgrim fathers. Between the drafting of their immortal charter of liberty in the cabin of the Mayflower and the fruition of their principles in the power and majesty of the republic of the United States of to-day is but a span in the records of the word, and yet it is the most important and beneficent chapter in history. To be able to claim descent from them, either by birth or adoption, is to glory in kinship with God's nobility.