6 



Horace Mann, and the eloquent Everett, and the grand old 

 Daniel Webster ! Do they not all 



"From those bright regions of eternal day. 

 Where they now shine among their fellow saints, 

 Arrayed in purer light, look down on us ? " 



He, whose mind conceived and inspired the idea of this 

 Society, — not his greatest conception, for it is to him that we 

 owe the United States Agricultural Society, the American 

 Pomological Society, the State Board of Agriculture, the State 

 Agricultural College, — he, whose genius planned, whose en- 

 terprise perfected, whose munificence endowed, whose exam- 

 ple blessed the beginning of this Society, whose twenty-third 

 anniversary you are celebrating, has never ceased to labor in 

 its behalf This youngest child of his paternity he has ever 

 loved with partial fondness. Other children he may have 

 who share that paternal care which continues even after the 

 number of years allotted to infancy, but no one of them has 

 ever been, or can ever be, so dear to him as this. And he is 

 here to-day. The time may come when we shall see his face 

 no more. But his counsels and his labors and his memory 

 will ever live. 



" They err who tell us these can die, 

 For they are indestructible." 



About forty years ago, when the City of Boston was com- 

 paratively a small village, on Court street, near the head of 

 Hanover street (as I have heard), in a room in an old-fash- 

 ioned building, to which you descended by a wooden step, 

 Robert New — " Bob " New — kept his barber-shop. He was 

 a pretty old man, and his customers, who, in those days made 

 the barber-shop a sort of exchange, where they learned the 

 gossip of the town, used to call him " Old New. " By-and-by 

 it transpired that the barber had a son born in his house, and 

 the curiosity of his customers was great to know what he 

 would christen him. So for some d|iys they asked him, 

 " What do you call the boy .-• " " Nothing, " was the reply ; 

 and so the child went by the name " Nothing New." And if 

 you should ask me what can be said here to-day in this pres- 



