ADDRESS OF
 

HON.  GEORGE   WILLIAM   CURTIS.
 

S a Yankee of the Yankees I have
long wished to dine with the Dutch¬
men to offer them my share of
thanks for their ancient hospitality
to the Pilgrim Fathers. That hos¬
pitality, indeed,— which at this
table I seem for the first time fully to comprehend,
—was so charming and seductive that it threatened
to make the Pilgrim childi'en Dutchmen instead of
Yankees, if they had not been wise enough to
heed Horace Greeley's advice, long before it was
uttered, "Go West, young man; go West." But
when, after that long and desolate voyage, they
reached the stern and rockbound American coast,
the warm vision of the old Dutch hospitaUty hung
in the wintry air, and, remembering the goodly and
pleasant Dutch city they had left behind, they in¬
stinctively turned to plant themselves on Hudson's
river near New Amsterdam. But Cape Cod, fore¬
seeing their coming from the beginning, and stretch¬
ing out into the ocean to secure the precious, sea-