The Holland Society of New York - Yearbook (New York, NY)

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al 40 To begin with, the Qutch discovered .our Hne harbor, and with that discovery is fairly included the city and all that thereuis in and about it, When the HaMM0on sailed into Manhattan Bay, all that we now see about us immediately became possible, and in an important sense Henryk Hudgon discovered the Greater New York, with its bustling streets, its imposing buildings, its hideous sky- scrapers, its Statue of Liberty, .its bridge, its high- stoop houses, its immaculate city government, its impeccable police, its statesmen, its poets, its orators, and that greatest last-century Dutchman, -Our Own Chauncey. I am sorry to miss him here to-night, the most reticent man since the days of VVilliam the Silent! Yet there are occasions on which our Chauncey is heard to speak, and speaks to be heard, and this fact has become known- far and wide, and to all classes of society. It is even said that a tramp succeeded in securing a meal from the wife ofthe lodge-keeper at Chestnut Grove, the summer home of lVIr. Depew on the Hudson, by promising to tell her a story, and adding the suggestion, lVIe and Chauncey Depew always talks best after dinner ! I referred a moment ago to the high-stoop houses so characteristic of New York, but which I am sorry to say are doomed, and will soon be as obso- lete as the practice of making calls on New Year's Day. And all this came about .by a very simple accident. It was one of these high-stoop houses that had long been the residence of a blue-blooded I-lollander, which had fallen more or less into bad repair, and during theabsence of the family on a visit to their friends in I-Iolland, the top of the stoop became. detached from its connections and ' ,+,. li 41 kydowrl iff, dl-5 P 1 file sti to ixteiwnis vllwng if ,fjzellpon gndvmdii ' idvlwe dv' ' W nCiE0fflC3lJ0Ul hoax, 13 it W Lhaggell gfpstothep . bf I gist ill Pmpnbasemmi iid into the W Sufillglw ,ei diff M 'hiausdi dll Jaflfll ml mtsiHiciC11lll'3muc m piuters their Ph? lmaj'Sll' something ah' nimrr Butler at if 3 tlagahout tht YW I- H' f1ee1,red'tiled f00l5 Ili Si iree:,nortl1aI in the 1 pitiiforls were lreely M liieryfurnaoxs in Ili! mt! lienameof lmmh inetoast Hg 13 W llnicroswpg, gm, is . llreached Nile the MILI d lemntquifo and llllljl victim: ad lllfliiyesl as it to il i11nuti:1hatad::: I wh lvlffeymemre tk d M 'lhuch an' Q inthf' Wg' -rf Q . -v: R., -as, Xp A ' ii i

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39 desire to be one of your members for the sake of my ancestry, and for the sake especially of the uncle after whom I was named, who was one of the noblest men I have ever known. If he had been my father instead of being my uncle it would havebeen all right, so far as eligibility- to the Holland Society is concerned. But while every drop of his blood was Dutch, in my case it is only every other drop, and that is maternal blood-which does n't count. While we are speaking of names I would say, en passamzf, that the large number of Dutch names of places, steamships, etc., ending in a syllable that has an imprecatory sound are not even remotely intended to -suggest profanity, and therefore the movement to replace this syllable by a deprecatory stroke is entirely unnecessary and uncalled for. I am led to make this remark from sympathy with a demure young lady, in one of our cross-town cars, who asked the conductor for a transfer to Amster- dash Avenue g and when the conductor didn't seem to know 'what she meant she stammered again, Amster-dash Avenue 5 my father will not let me say the other word. I could have thrashed that father ! u But, to our toast. y If you call that a toast I call it a plate of toast well piled up, and buttered at that. But it is only in consonance with the entire history and achievements of Holland in the past that so small a country should evoke so large a toast. The Dutch character is favorable to the prose- cution of discoveries. It is characteristic of the Dutchman that he goes slow but always gets there., The only exception to this, which 1135 become historical, is the Flying Dutchman, who ffied 3 more rapid method of progression and never got there ! y

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41 fell down into the area, thus reversing the direction of the steps. As this was not immediately oor. 1-ected, owing to the absence of the family, it was seized upon as offering a practical suggestion for a new departure in domestic architecture, and now it has come about that a New Yorker owning one of these high-stoop houses will not rest until he has Changed it so that, instead of mounting up, the steps to the parlor floor, with head erect and a proud sense of proprietorship, he now dives with bowed head into the basement like a woodchuck into its burrow. Such great results follow sometimes from slight causes. D A part of my toast refers to Dutch art. I am not sufficiently a critic in art to assign to Dutch painters their place in the world's school of art, but I may say something about the educational side of Dutch art. But for it we should not have known that about the year I, houses in Jerusalem had steep, red-tiled roofs and gables looking toward the street, nor that in the domestic economy of Hades pitchforks were freely used to toss lost souls into the flery furnaces in which xthey were forever to roast! - f The name of Leeuwenhoeck has been mentioned in the toast. I-le was practically the inventor of the microscope, which is now perfected until it has reached such a power that we are enabled to chase the malarial organism through the vitals of the mosquito and into its final resting-place in the human victim g and to demonstrate that we hold our lives, as it were, at the mercy of i miC1'0bCS S0 minute, that a dozen of them placed side by side scarcely measure the thousandth part of an inch. With such an instrument, perhaps Chief Devery